Ultrasound of Breastfeeding Baby

Have you ever wondered how breastfeeding works? It turns out that babies create a vacuum when they suckle.

Until now, most studies examining the mechanics of breastfeeding have focused on bottle-feeding infants, or on old X-rays that were of poor quality.

Instead, Geddes and her colleagues combined ultrasound imaging of infants suckling on the breast with measurements of the strength of the vacuum created by the baby's mouth in 20 infants aged 3 to 24 weeks as they breastfed (see video).

"What we see is that when the tongue is lowered and the vacuum is applied, that's when the milk is coming out of the breast, and that doesn't involve any compression of the nipple," says Geddes. "It's not a milking action at all."

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