Study Finds that Music Helps to Comfort Premature Babies

If you play live music to your premature baby, you can help to improve their wellbeing. This is according to a new study from US researchers, who have found that playing live music to a premature baby can slow their heartbeat and help the child breathe more easily. The researchers also noted that if you sing to your child or play an instrument, you can increase their sucking behaviours. This improves feeding time, and can have a positive effects on your little one’s sleeping patterns.

 

The study was conducted by Beth Israel Hospital in New York across 11 US hospitals, and involved the mothers of 272 premature babies aged 32 weeks and under, with respiratory distress syndrome, clinical sepsis and/or were small for gestational age. Music therapists gave several sessions over two weeks with singing, no music or two instruments. These were an ocean disc, which is a cylinder full of beads which supposedly mimics the fluid noises of the womb, and gato box, which is a wooden drum meant to simulate the sound of a heartbeat.

 

Parents were allowed to choose the songs, opting for  ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’ by Marvin Gaye and ‘Pick up the Pieces’ by Average White Band. The researchers picked the nursery rhyme ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ if a song wasn’t chosen. As long as any song was slowed down to sound like a lullaby, the music calmed the child down regardless of which song was played. However, because live music can be adapted to meet the needs of the child, this had a greater effect on the babies compared to recorded music.

 

Singing to the baby made them more attentive and was the most effective method for slowing their heart rate. When parents picked their own song to sing, their own stress levels declined, helping them to create an emotional bond with the baby, and the child also had a higher intake of calories. When parents sung the nursery rhyme, this showed increased levels of oxygenation in the brain. The ocean disc was the best at improving the baby’s sleeping and breathing rate, while the gato box was the most helpful in improving sucking behaviours.

Study Finds that Music Helps to Comfort Premature Babies

Categories: music, Premature Babies, Research

Why Massage Can Benefit Premature Infants

Premature infants who are born in the specialised environment of the Newborn Intensive Care Units often deal with stress from their surroundings. As these children are under-developed due to being pre-term, they are often born with an immature autonomic nervous system, known as ANS, which controls the stress responses and recovery. Endless medical procedures, caregiving activities and mechanical ventilation all contribute to stress on the body, in addition to being away from their mothers. In particularly stressful conditions, the ANS can overreact which leads to pre-term infants failing to process these stressors in the right way. However, researchers from the University of Louisville School of Nursing have found that massage therapy, consisting of moderate pressure and stroking the soft tissues, can help to reduce the stress on the body. The therapy included flexing and extending the joints of the arms and legs to help increase the heart rate variability in male infants  – however, in female infants, the same was not applicable.

The HRV was measured as part of the ANS function and the development of the infant. Children born at the right gestational period show an increased HRV whereas pre-term babies display a lower rate, as well as an inability to respond to stressors appropriately. In this study, researchers noted that male infants showed an increased HRV which was similar to full-term infants, supporting their ability to respond to stress correctly. Massage therapy could enhance the development of the ANS in male pre-term infants, as well as improving their ability to respond the stressful events around them. Further studies need to tae place to see what other effects the massage therapy can have on pre-term children, as well as to ascertain why the HRV was not affected in female infants. Researchers believe that the hormonal difference could be to blame, but need to analyse the results further to determine if this is the case.

Categories: massage, Premature Babies, Stress

Can Holding Your Premature Baby Help to Improve His Health?

If your baby is born prematurely, you can worry for their wellbeing, as well as overall family wellness. Premature babies can go through countless procedures in an intimidating neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), which can make you feel like you have no part to play in your baby’s health or happiness, but new research from the School of Nursing suggests that you have a bigger role in your baby’s wellness than you might think.

Marsha Campbell-Yeo is an assistant professor at Dal and a clinician scientist and nurse practitioner with the IWK Health Centre. She researches how maternal-driven interventions can help improve outcomes for at-risk preterm and full-term infants, specifically looking into how skin-to-skin contact from mothers can help babies better manage pain and stress during procedures. According to Dr Campbell-Yeo, ‘We’ve shown there’s tremendous benefit in something as simple as having a mother hold her baby skin-to-skin during a procedure — up to 30% reduction in the short-term pain response, as well as improvements in how the newborn regulates that pain.’

Premature babies can undergo as many as 500 to 1000 painful procedures as part of their medical care, and so any relief that you can provide your baby with is crucial. Dr Campbell-Yeo explained, ‘Repeated exposure to these procedures can lead to changes in how they perceive pain, and how they regulate not just pain but other forms of stress later in life. There’s also new, emerging literature that considers how it can actually change the way their brains develop.’

Dr Campbell-Yeo and her colleagues have shown similar pain relieving benefits when skin-to-skin contact is provided by fathers, unrelated women, and even a twin, and though the majority of her research has looked at the tiniest and most fragile babies, she asserts that healthy children also benefit from being close to their mother. Dr Campbell-Yeo said, ‘All babies experience pain. With changes in immunization practices, children now undergo up to 20 injections in the first few years of life. Given that up to one in 10 older children and adults now have needle fear, minimizing routine pain associated with these procedures may help with larger problems down the road.’

Can Holding Your Premature Baby Help to Improve His Health?

Categories: Premature Babies, Research, Skin-to-Skin Contact