Every year 15 million premature babies are born and for decades progress has been made in their care so that more and more of these little heroes get ahead without sequelae. The importance of the kangaroo method for premature babies, or breastfeeding, was already known and now a study has shown that providing pleasant tactile sensations to babies allows better brain development .
In contrast, the more physical pain the premature infants have felt as a result of needles or other interventions during their stay in the neonatal ICU, the lower their brain response to other mild tactile stimuli, as if the sense of touch was impaired by these procedures or as if the brain had not developed following a normal evolution.
The research has been carried out by specialists from the United States and published in the journal “Current Biology”. Its authors also found that the more premature a baby is, the lower its response to gentle touch.
For this reason, it is important to enhance the pleasant tactile sensations in the newborn , in order to mold and promote the development of his brain. And it is that we often take into account other senses of the baby, such as sight or hearing, but touch also provides many of the first learning experiences.
Using EEGs, the scientists recorded the brain responses to gentle touch (blows of air in the palm of the hand) of more than a hundred full-term and premature newborns about to be discharged from the hospital. The responses of the cerebral cortex were taken into account in relation to painful or pleasant stimuli during the stay in the ICU, recorded in their medical records.
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Pleasant stimuli: breastfeeding, skin-to-skin contact, massage, or occupational therapy sessions.
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Painful sensations: injections, punctures, tube insertions or minor surgical interventions.
The sense of babies who had suffered painful sensations was affected, let’s say that a kind of “immunization” could have occurred when they had felt pain. And if we thought that the provision of sugar or medications to mitigate the pain of these procedures would nullify this result, it is not so according to the study.
The touch of the premature baby
They may see little or nothing at birth, but premature babies already have all of their touch receptors going. However, while in the uterus the experiences would be the heat of the amniotic fluid, touching oneself, the cord, the uterine walls … in the hospital the sensations multiply and too many times they are not pleasant.
In the midst of neuronal development, it is necessary to ensure that the baby does not suffer inappropriate stimuli to prevent the nervous system from suffering and, as far as possible, to develop normally, without strong impacts.
For all these reasons, that the baby’s family is close is very important, providing the premature infant with as many positive stimuli as possible. Aggressive medicine does not do them any good and work is done on less invasive alternatives and as long as the parent can be with their baby, touching it, providing heat, food … it will be better .
Not all neonatal ICUs have the same policy regarding the entry or stay of parents with their babies, but undoubtedly this evidence should be taken into account more and more that, taking the appropriate precautions given the fragility of premature infants, the best thing is that they are close to them.
In the end, it is clear that children who spend more time in skin-to-skin contact with their parents go home earlier because they do better than those who spend less time and are more in the incubator. Premature babies need to feel touched, pampered, and not sore .
Photo | iStock
Via | Cell
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