The most exciting research I have seen in a long time!

Oh man.  I love it when my interests coincide.  I was at a lactation conference with ABM and ELACTA to earn lactation consultant CME last May in Rotterdam and look what I stumbled across!

As far as my Pubmed searches go, the research hasn't been published, just presented so far.  And it will probably be published in German first.  But anyway, this is what the author (M. Stosik is my hero!) did.

A little background: chylothorax is (another) rare condition that can happen especially after heart surgery in babies, where the thoracic duct in the chest is damaged during the surgery, such that fats from the blood and diet can then leak into the chest cavity.  It's not good to have fat floating around in your chest!  So these post-operative babies are placed on a non fat diet (sound familiar) until their thoracic duct heals.

Nonfat formula exists, but it would be awesome to make fat free breastmilk easily at home, right?  So these clever researchers devised an easy way to use big syringes in the refrigerator to make skim breastmilk.  They filled syringes full of breast milk, let the milk separate into fatty and fat free portions, then squeezed the fat free milk out for baby to eat (and found something else useful to do with the fat - like for these babies, save it for later when the thoracic duct is healed!  But for LPLD babies, I've also seen milk banks that accept it with eagerness).  But, the question becomes, is this system really good enough?  How fat free does this milk actually become??

Well, they had a lab, so they checked!  After 3 days in the fridge, they got the fat down from 4.40% tofat free' though is less than 0.1%, and is best obtained with centrifugation.  But could this be used by moms of LPLD babies???  Maybe!
0.47%.  Wow!!  They even tried frozen breastmilk and thawed it and let it separate out - yep, got it less than 1%.  The only pain in the butt with this, practically, is waiting a solid 3 days, which can be hard if a mom's supply is just enough to keep up with the next day.  At 24 hours the milk was still down to 1.77%, then 1.18% at 48 hours, so not bad.  The standard for being '

Each baby's exact mutation that's causing LPLD can be a little different, or expressed a little differently in his or her body.  That's why some adults have to stick strictly to <10 g of fat per day, and others have a little more wiggle room.  It can also depend on how sensitive your pancreas is, it seems like if you've had a few episodes of pancreatitis in the past, you are more likely to have them in the future with lower TG levels.  This method of making skimmed breastmilk could definitely benefit newly diagnosed babies, especially as a first step in seeing how they respond to a low fat diet, or when a LPLD family is travelling (I'm not bringing my centrifuge nowhere!).