Skin-to-skin Care Cuts Stress for Preemies And Moms

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Skin-to-skin contact between a mother and her infant in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) can reduce stress, doctors report in the journal Pediatrics this month.

Immediate infant-mother separation is a well-known source of stress in preterm deliveries, Evalotte Morelius and colleagues, from the University Hospital in Linkoping, Sweden, note. Skin-to-skin care is one method that has been proposed to alleviate this stress.

In the present study, the researchers measured salivary cortisol -- a stress hormone -- as well as heart rate, and pain in 17 mother-infant pairs at their first and fourth skin-to-skin care session. The infants were born early, between 25 and 33 weeks gestational age, and weighed from 495 to 2590 grams.

With the intervention, the infant was taken out of the incubator and placed inside the mother's hospital gown for about an hour to achieve skin-to-skin contact.

In mothers, the skin-to-skin intervention was associated with a drop in salivary cortisol levels, indicating a reduction in stress. It was also associated with a drop in heart rate, and pain scores and with an improvement in mood.

In infants, the intervention was tied to a reduction in heart rate and pain scores, but the effect on salivary cortisol levels was variable.

"Our results lend additional support to the value of skin-to-skin care in neonatal intensive care," the authors state. "The mothers' need for support seem to be more pronounced in the first skin-to-skin session as our results show a higher degree of stress as compared with later skin-to-skin care."

SOURCE: Pediatrics, November 2005.