Sara Fein, PhD; Consumer Studies Staff, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Food and Drug Administration

    The Infant Feeding Practices Study II is a large-scale study of infant feeding and care practices conducted jointly by the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  About 4,000 pregnant women throughout the United States completed questionnaires when they were in their third trimester of pregnancy, and about 2,000 of these women were followed with nearly monthly questionnaires until their infants were 12 months old.  Data were collected in 2005-2007.  Topics include infant feeding, infant health, employment, child care, sleeping arrangements, food allergy and other related topics.  In addition, about 1,500 of the pregnant and 1,500 of the postpartum women, and a comparison group of about 1,500 women who were neither pregnant nor postpartum completed diet intake questionnaires.  

          First results were presented in the form of eight oral presentations at the APHA Annual Meeting in November 2007.  A journal supplement is under preparation and expected to be completed in early summer 2008.  The study data will be available as a public use database from CDC toward the end of 2008.  For more information about this study, see www.cdc.gov/ifps.