Newborn Like a Kangaroo: Israeli brain researcher proves that ‘kangaroo care’ – skin-to-skin contact with mom – improves a preemie’s brain functioning later in life.
Newborn Like a Kangaroo
Newborn Like a Kangaroo:A new Israeli study reveals that “kangaroo care” for premature babies has life-long effects on neurological and psychological development.
Conducted by Dr. Ruth Feldman – a professor in the department of psychology and in the Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University, and adjunct professor at the Child Study Center at Yale – the study shows that skin-to-skin contact between mother and newborn improves brain functioning later in life.
The concept of “kangaroo care” (named for the way that this marsupial carries her unformed offspring in her pouch) is not new. Introduced by neonatologist Edgar Rey Sanabria in 1978 in Bogota, Colombia — where access to incubators was limited — it is a method of using maternal body heat to prevent hypothermia in preemies.
That it proved effective in keeping infants warm made sense. But Feldman and her research team set out to examine whether it had a measurable influence.
They began performing a double-blind study in 1996 to 1998, looking at one group of 73 premature babies in a neonatal unit receiving standard incubator care, and another set of 73 whose mothers provided skin-to-skin contact for one hour a day for two weeks in a row. The parents in the control group were not aware of the kangaroo-care study, but were offered ongoing psychological and medical care for their babies.
At seven intervals over the course of the next decade, all 146 of these children were tested with brain scans. Today, they are 16 to 18 years old.
“What we found was that the children in the kangaroo-care group had better cognitive skills, sleep patterns and a higher functioning autonomic nervous system, better able to cope with stress,” Feldman told ISRAEL21c. “And their mothers were more sensitive parents.”
Could be mom or dad
This is a groundbreaking discovery because it provides scientific proof that premature babies, even in hospitals where there is no lack of incubators, experience long-term benefits from something as simple as having their mothers cuddle them for a short time every day.
When one considers that 12 percent of babies in the Western world are born prematurely, and the rate in underdeveloped countries is higher due to poor nutrition and sanitation, that’s quite a significant finding.
The adult providing the skin-to-skin contact does not have to be the baby’s mother – or so it would seem.
“But when we told parents involved in the kangaroo-care group that one of them would have to commit to being with the baby [in the neonatal department] every day for two weeks, it turned out to be the mothers who were better able to schedule it,” Feldman says, emphasizing that all the participants in the study are loving and involved parents.
For the rest of the story go to: Israel21c
Newborn Like a Kangaroo
