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Tuesday December 24 3:56 PM EST 

Skin Contact Helps Preemies Breast-Feed

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Breast milk has long been known to be the
"perfect" nutrition for an infant,
containing antibodies and a host of other factors that can protect a
newborn. 

Now researchers say that maximizing skin-to-skin contact during
breast-feeding may help calm
low-birth-weight infants and increase the oxygen content of their blood.
The practice also encourages
mothers to breast-feed such tiny infants for a longer period of time,
according to the report in the current
issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. 

Unlike other infants, premature babies can be easily overstimulated by
noise and sound after birth. Some
researchers have suggested that such infants need soothing,
sleep-inducing surroundings and
"skin-to-skin contact seems to provide this type of an environment,"
according to the lead author of the
report, Dr. Jo-Ann Blaymore Bier of the Brown University School of
Medicine in Providence, Rhode
Island. 

"During skin-to-skin contact, both mother and infant were observed to be
calm; mothers rarely talked to
their infant and if they spoke, they did it softly," she wrote. "During
standard contact, in contrast,
mothers were more likely to engage their infant in conversation and
attempt to awaken the infant." 

In the study, 50 babies weighing less than 1500 grams or 53 ounces at
birth were divided into two
groups. In the skin-to-skin contact group, the infants were diapered and
fed while being held upright
between the mother's breasts. Both mother and the child were covered
with a blanket. In the standard
contact group, the infants were diapered, clothed, wrapped in a blanket
and then cradled in the mother's
arms. 

Bier and colleagues measured the baby's blood-oxygen levels, heart rate,
respiration, temperature, the
mother's milk production and the duration of breast feeding. They found
that just 11% of the
blood-oxygen readings dropped below 90% during skin-to-skin contact
compared to 24% of those with
standard breast feeding. 

"The higher oxygen saturation during skin-to-skin contact is indicative
of an improved physiological state
of the infant during skin-to-skin contact," according to Bier. 

In the skin-to-skin group, 90% of the moms continued breast-feeding in
the hospital, and 50% continued
at home compared to the standard group, in which only 61% of moms
continued breast-feeding in the
hospital and 11% at home. 

Unlike findings from previous studies, skin-to-skin contact did not
result in the mothers producing more
milk, according to the report. However, the breast-feeding episodes were
short -- once a day for 10
minutes -- to allow very small and sick infants to participate in the
study. 

"We speculate that longer and more frequent sessions may have resulted
in a marked improvement in
lactation, as described in other studies," Bier and colleagues wrote. 

"Skin-to-skin contact is desirable because it is a natural, easy to
implement and cost-effective
intervention to improve the success and duration of breast-feeding
low-birth-weight infants," they
concluded. SOURCE: Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine
(1996;150:1265-1269) 


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