Skin-to-Skin Contact of Parents and Premature Babies Help in Brain Development

Touch does more than what an artificial environment can achieve. Babies born before 37 weeks of gestational age come under the category of premature babies. Preterm birth is the second leading cause of death among children five and below in the world.

In U.S. one in every eight babies (more than half a million) are born prematurely. A preterm birth brings concern among parents as it lead to many health problems for the child including intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, breathing/respiratory problems, feeding/ digestive problems and vision/hearing loss.

Helping and bringing hopes to scores of parents, researchers have found the efficiency of a new technique called 'Kangaroo Mother Care' in improving the baby's condition than an incubator.

The findings reported by researchers from Universite Laval in Quebec City in the October issue of Acta Paediatrica also found the system helping to improve the brain development of the baby and leading to better brain functioning during teenage compared to others.

Kangaroo Mother Care is a method of remaining a skin-to-skin contact between the parents and the premature baby.

Babies born before completing 33rd week of pregnancy are known to be at higher risk of experiencing some cognitive and behavioral problems. Researchers Cyril Schneider and Réjean Tessier along with their colleagues initiated to examine the effectiveness of the Kangaroo Mother Care system to solve the occurrence.

For the analysis they looked at 18 premature infants kept in incubators, 21 premature infants in kangaroo contact for 29 days and nine babies born completing their term.

Brain function of these participants at age 15 was monitored using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Results supported the researcher's theory.

"Thanks to Kangaroo Mother Care, infants benefited from nervous system stimulation-the sound of the parent's heart and the warmth of their body-during a critical period for the development of neural connections between the cerebral hemispheres. This promoted immediate and future brain development," neurophysiologist Schneider, said in a statement.

According to Psychology researcher Réjean Tessier, "infants in incubators also receive a lot of stimulation, but often the stimulation is too intense and stressful for the brain capacity of the very premature. The Kangaroo Mother Care reproduces the natural conditions of the intrauterine environment in which the infants would have developed had they not been born premature. These beneficial effects on the brain are in evidence at least until adolescence and perhaps beyond."