Table 3.
Characteristics of human milk mineral clusters1.
| Element | Cluster I N = 96 (mg/Kg) |
Cluster II N = 18 (mg/Kg) |
Cluster III N = 86 (mg/Kg) |
p 2 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | SD | Mean | SD | Mean | SD | ||
| Na | 97.02 | 30.77 | 120.84 | 63.09 | 79.62 | 25.40 | <0.01 |
| K | 510.06 | 145.56 | 500.79 | 138.50 | 276.11 | 88.42 | <0.01 |
| Cu | 0.18 | 0.06 | 0.25 | 0.07 | 0.26 | 0.04 | <0.01 |
| Mg | 27.25 | 6.36 | 24.54 | 6.30 | 22.69 | 5.86 | <0.01 |
| Fe | 2.65 | 0.82 | 3.13 | 1.36 | 2.02 | 0.66 | <0.01 |
| Zn | 0.61 | 0.35 | 1.93 | 1.04 | 1.22 | 0.57 | <0.01 |
| Ca | 350.00 | 77.41 | 313.72 | 98.19 | 279.37 | 45.33 | <0.01 |
| Mn | 0.035 | 0.013 | 0.074 | 0.034 | 0.041 | 0.016 | <0.01 |
| Se | 0.00 | 0.006 | 0.048 | 0.030 | 0.010 | 0.008 | <0.01 |
1The mineral clusters were calculated by NbClust R package (version 3.0.1.) (16) based on K-means clustering algorithm.
2The significant p-values across clusters were calculated by multiple linear regressions, which were adjusted for infant age, infant sex and city. p<0.05 means statistically significant.