Re: “Education and Experiences of Antenatal Breast Milk Expression: A Systematic Review” by Sobik et al.

We would appreciate you publishing this letter to the editor regarding the recently published “systematic review” by Dr. Sarah Sobik, et al. ¹

The article is published as a “systematic review.” However, the article includes both qualitative and quantitative research. When both types of research are included, the appropriate methodology is an integrative review. To that end, we published an integrative review on this topic that was not included in their table of evidence. ²

Furthermore, the authors included some case series publications. However, a case series published by us is also missing from the table of evidence. ³

In addition, there was a pilot study conducted for the DAME study that was also not included in the table of evidence, which is a key omission. ⁴

There are some other concerning errors in the article as well.

The publication year for Soltani et al. research is listed incorrectly.

This research was published in 2012, not 2022.

In table 4, there is a column about when antenatal expression was initiated. Of great concern is that they report for Connolly et al. (2019) that hand expression was initiated between 20 and 36 weeks gestation. We examined the original research and there was instruction provided at that time range but no reports of initiation of hand expression this early. This is really important because all published research focuses on starting antenatal milk expression at either 36 or 37 weeks gestation.

Our integrative review included many of the same articles, however, our findings are different in that we noted that the time to start antenatal milk expression was later than they reported. In addition, the findings of prior research are primarily subjective, not objective.