Babies born very early had stronger neurodevelopmental performance at 1 year if they received more skin-to-skin care as newborns, a study found.
Skin-to-skin cuddling with a parent has lasting cognitive benefits for premature babies, according to a new Stanford Medicine study. Preemies who received more skin-to-skin contact, also known as kangaroo care, while hospitalized as newborns were less likely to be developmentally delayed at 1 year of age, the study found., showed that even small increases in the amount of skin-to-skin time made a measurable difference in the babies' neurologic development during their first year.
But premature birth still leaves babies at risk for long-term neurodevelopmental problems, including developmental delays and learning disabilities. Doctors and families have long hoped for treatments they could use during the newborn period to prevent such challenges. It's been slower to catch on in the United States, especially for premature babies, who generally receive high-tech intensive care. But a growing body of research suggests that the practice has benefits for preemies' brains, possibly because it could offer some of the same developmental inputs they would have received if they had not been born early.
In addition to accounting for infants' gestational age , the outcomes were adjusted for families' socioeconomic status and for four common complications of prematurity: bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a breathing complication; brain hemorrhage, or bleeding; sepsis, an infection of the bloodstream; and necrotizing enterocolitis, an intestinal condition.
The frequency and duration of skin-to-skin contact predicted 12-month cognitive scores even after controlling for possible confounding factors, including the infant's gestational age and medical complications, and the family's socioeconomic status and frequency with which they visited the NICU.Although the study was not set up to explore how skin-to-skin care benefits babies' brains, the researchers have some educated guesses.
In addition, many preemies are not developmentally ready to breastfeed, and skin-to-skin care can provide an alternate way to promote bonding between parents and babies.
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