Medications for increasing milk supply in mothers expressing breastmilk for their preterm hospitalised infants.

Breastmilk remains the optimal form of enteral nutrition for term and preterm infants until up to six months postnatal age. Mothers of preterm infants who have not established suck feeds must express their breastmilk and often have difficulty in maintaining sufficient volume for their infants' needs (Donath 2008). In preterm infants, donor breastmilk reduced the occurrence of necrotising enterocolitis, when compared with formula feeds (McGuire 2003). Also, case-control studies have suggested that breastmilk is associated with an improvement in feeding tolerance, a reduction in significant gastrointestinal infective events (Beeby 1992) and a reduction in late-onset sepsis (Schanler 1999) when compared with formula feeds in preterm hospitalised infants.