Professor Kathleen Arcaro, who studies breast milk and is an author of this work, points out that evidence suggests that women who have increased permeability of the tissues that line the mammary gland (signs of subclinical mastitis occurring one week postpartum) are less likely to continue to breastfeed.
Subclinical mastitis differs from the typical mastitis that produces pain, swelling and fever. While a high concentration of sodium in breast milk is known as a biomarker of this condition, “surprisingly, there is almost no technique available to detect that at low cost, high precision and short time,” says Jinglei Ping, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, corresponding author of the paper.
“Breast milk samples won’t just be sent off to a lab for someone to examine.”
“He continues: ‘Professor Arcaro and colleagues thought that if they could easily and inexpensively and quickly find sodium in breast milk, that could really do a lot of good for new mothers.’ ” This could help identify new parents whose milk supply is not as good as it should be.” Reason this is important is that there are ways to handle elevated mammary permeability.
Their solution: Create a better testing device.
That device would be able to measure highly sensitive sodium in a small footprint, measuring roughly the same size as a blood sugar device, and provide it quickly and cheaply.
Their device yields results in three minutes, instead of 30; is the size of a quarter, as opposed to a lab bench; costs $1 per test, contrasted to $110 and $20 per device costed relative to $180,000 (0.3% of genome costed per genome), and and 1,000 orders magnitude less milk to test (microliters instead of millilitres) and is easy to use.
They have larger equipment footprint, a lower detection limit, and more comparison in terms of time to deliver results and price other than other less user friendly tests.
According to Ping, “That’s what we want for a point-of-care test—low cost, high precision and high time efficiency.” He can picture the device at simple clinics, like a blood pressure cuff at a drugstore.
“In women, there’s very little study of subclinical mastitis,” says Arcaro. “Qualitative changes in milk quality and reduced fat content lowers milk value, but the main source of what we know comes from the dairy industry because ‘subclinical mastitis’, which is characterised by an inflammatory response in the mammary gland, is also associated with such qualitative changes in milk quality.” She hopes this device will do wonders to push the research on this subject.
Reference:
University of Massachusetts Amherst. Team develops new device to identify biomarkers of breastfeeding complicationsÂ
