The benefit that premature infants gain from skin-to-skin contact with their mothers is measurable even 10
years after birth, reports a new study in Biological Psychiatry.
In a new study, Dr. Ruth Feldman, a Professor at Bar-Ilan University, and her colleagues studied the impact of different levels of physical contact on prematurely born infants.
"In this decade-long study, we show for the first time that providing maternal-newborn skin-to-skin contact to premature infants in the neonatal period improves children's functioning ten years later in systems shown to be sensitive to early maternal deprivation in animal research," said Feldman.
Specifically, the researchers compared standard incubator care to a novel intervention called "Kangaroo Care" (KC), which was originally developed to manage the risk for hypothermia in prematurely born babies in Columbia, where they struggled with a lack of access to incubators. This method, in essence, uses the mother's body heat to keep their babies warm.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-01-critical-premature-infants.html
Abstract in Biological Psychiatry: Maternal-Preterm Skin-to-Skin Contact Enhances Child Physiologic Organization and Cognitive Control Across the First 10 Years of Life
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