Preterm infants show reduced stress behaviors and activity after 5 days of massage therapy
Section snippets
Consent and screening process
Attending physicians at a large urban university Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) referred medically stable preterm infants who met the study criteria, which included (a) gestational age between 28 and 32 weeks, (b) birthweight between 800 and 1400 g and (c) NICU hospitalization between 15 and 60 days. These criteria follow those of other preterm infant massage studies (see Field et al., 1986). Mothers of the preterm infants were approached about the study when they visited their infants at
Results
The background and demographic data were examined using ANOVA and Chi-square analyses to assess equivalence between the groups. The two groups did not differ on any variable (see Table 1).
Discussion
Preterm infants are exposed daily to numerous stressors while being treated in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), resulting in their display of heightened motor activity and stress behaviors (Anand et al., 2005). Attenuation of these stress behaviors is desirable since chronic exposure to stress has been associated with medical and neurodevelopmental problems in the neonate (Grunau et al., 2001; Mitchell & Boss, 2002). The current study examined the cumulative effects of massage therapy
Acknowledgements
We thank the parents and their infants for participating in this study. We also thank the attending physicians and the nurses at Jackson Memorial Hospital and the researchers and massage therapists who assisted with the project. This research was supported by an NIH/NCCAM award (AT 00370) to Maria Hernandez-Reif, an NIH/NCCAM Senior Research Scientist award (#AT 01585) and an NIH/NIMH Merit award (MH #46586) to Tiffany Field, in addition to funding from the Johnson & Johnson Pediatric Institute
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2021, NeuroscienceCitation Excerpt :Because heart-rate and skin conductance both reflect activity in the autonomic nervous system, our and Aguirre et al. (2019) and Fairhurst et al. (2014) results, together, reveal that this system is already tuned to social-like stimulation across different sensory modalities by the age of 4 months. From a clinical perspective, our study corroborates findings that suggest that touch therapy, including massage, kangaroo care and osteopathic manipulative treatment, all may have beneficial effects on the infants’ well-being and developmental outcomes, being associated with decreased stress response and autonomic arousal, improved pain tolerance, enhanced immune-system parameters, and improvements in attentional responses and cognitive and motor development (Feldman et al., 2002; Hernandez-Reif et al., 2007; Manzotti et al., 2019). Most of these studies analysed the effects of tactile stimulation occurring in the context of dyadic interaction with the caregiver, whereas in clinical settings infants are most commonly handled by clinicians or researchers.