Mother cuddling and sleep state in preterm newborns

Mother cuddling (MC) provides closeness of newborn baby with the mother or father, which leads to physiological and psychological warmth and bonding. It is enough to stimulate the baby s vestibular stimulation from the mothers breathing and chest movement, auditory stimulation from the mother’s voice and natural sounds of breathing and the heartbeat, bytouching the skin of mother. All these stimulations are important for preterm newborn babies’ development. Preterm newborns are vulnerable to mortality and morbidity and high risk for NICU admission with many painful procedures.Itseems that MC acts as a natural hypnosis.Method:we searched the papers in ISI, Pubmed and scopous to study the effect of mother cuddling on sleep of preterm newbornsResults:We found 23 papers in scopous by all keywords, 6203 documents with skin to skin contact in keywords,and35and 36 papers with kangaroo mother care and sleepin scopous and Pubmed, respectively.Discussion:Studies suggest that preterm infantswho experience MC, show improvement in sleep patternandcognitive development, decrease in stress levels and pain responses, and positive effects on motor development. In MC there is amore regular and deepersleep with better integrity of sleeping, sleep cycling isoptimized, and baby is more alert and active after waking up. The length of time that preterm infants spend in deep sleep and quite awake states increases while quite sleep state occurs more and crying is less.Conclusion:After birth, the best place for baby is mother’s chest. Cuddle, isthe replace of uterus and the best feeding way is breast milk instead of umbilical cord blood. It should continue straight for 2 years (as our holy Quran advice) with No separated bed. Since MC is natural hypnosis in newborns, we can use it for doing painful procedures in newborn.

کلیدواژه ها:

mother cuddling ، skin to skin contact ، sleep pattern ، preterm newborns ، kangaroo mother care