There's good news for women with epilepsy. Breastfeeding your baby while taking your epilepsy drugs does not appear to harm the developing brains of your children, according to a new study. There have been concerns that using epilepsy drugs while breast-feeding could pose a threat to youngsters because it's been shown that some epilepsy drugs can cause cell death in young animals' brains.

The new study included 181 children of mothers who had epilepsy and took drugs to control the condition. Nearly 43 percent of the children were breast-fed for an average of seven months. IQ tests conducted on the children when they were 6 years old found no differences between those who were breast-fed and those who were not, according to the study published online in JAMA Pediatrics. It also showed that testing of breast-fed children at 6 years old -- an age when more meticulous testing can be performed -- reflected beneficial effects of breast-feeding, with higher IQ and better verbal abilities than nonbreast-fed children.