Researchers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of medicine may just have provided women across the world with another good reason to breastfeed their infants instead of resorting to the bottle.

According to a new study, whose lead author is an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the facility, women with a family history of breast cancer were found to be 59% less likely to develop the disease themselves if they breast fed their children.

In relation to the findings of her work Alison Stuebe said “This is good news for women with a family history of breast cancer. Our results suggest a woman can lower her risk of cancer simply by breastfeeding her children,”

The study analyzed data about women from fourteen different US States who reported at least one pregnancy in 1997. The approximately 60,000 women were then followed closely until 2005, to monitor how many of them developed invasive breast cancer.

In those women who reported having either a mother or a female sibling who had been previously diagnosed with breast cancer the researchers found that the women who had breastfed their children were half as likely to develop the disease as those who did not. The study found no such difference in the risk for those women who did have a history of breast cancer in their immediate family though.

The study also found that the length of time that a woman breast fed was not a factor. Three months or three years said Stuebe , the results were the same.

For those women with a family history of invasive breast cancer the positive benefits of breast feeding were similar to those of taking the anti estrogen drug Tamoxifen, often prescribed as a preventative measure for such patients, for five years. But of course notes Stuebe, unlike the drug “Breastfeeding is good for mothers and for babies.”

The reason for the phenomena is still unclear. The authors of the study suspect however that when a new mother chooses not to breastfeed the inflammation and engorgement of the breasts that occurs causes changes in the make up of the breast tissue itself.

Alison Steube hopes that the findings made by her and her team will help mothers who wish to breastfeed do so for as long as they like without pressure or discrimination. “Mothers and babies need supportive hospital policies, paid maternity leave, and workplace accommodations so that they can meet their breastfeeding goals,” Stuebe says. “Public health begins with breastfeeding.” A recent CDC study demonstrated that more than half of the women they surveyed said that they were forced to stop breast feeding their infants before they wanted to.