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 Researchers found that premature babies who were
exposed to more talking from adults, such as their parents, in the
neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), tended to score higher on
development tests later on.
"This is certainly a remarkable, easy-to-implement and
cost-effective intervention of informing moms of visiting their
children in the intensive care unit," Dr. Betty Vohr said.
Vohr is the study's senior author from the Warren Alpert Medical
School of Brown University and Women and Infants Hospital in
Providence, Rhode Island.
She and her colleagues write in the journal Pediatrics that a baby
still in the womb is exposed to its mother's voice, but a baby born
very prematurely is kept in a NICU, where it is exposed to noises
from monitors and machines but little talk.
Previous research has found that children born early are at an
increased risk for language problems later on, but it's unknown
whether talking to them early on will help their later scores.
For the new study, the researchers recruited families of 36 babies
that were medically stable but born before 32 weeks of pregnancy and
kept in the NICU.
A baby is considered "full term" if it is born between 39 and 41
weeks of pregnancy, according to the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal
Medicine (see Reuters Health story of Oct. 22, 2013, here:
http://reut.rs/189Cm4Q.)
The babies in the study wore vests equipped with devices that record
and analyze the conversations and background noises near the baby
over 16 hours. The recordings were taken at 32 and 36 weeks of
gestational age.
Overall, the babies were exposed to more talking at 36 weeks than at
32 weeks, but the actual amount of talk each baby was exposed to
during the study periods varied from 144 words to over 26,000 words.
The word tallies were then compared to babies' Bayley-III scores,
which measure how a baby is developing in regards to motor, language
and thinking skills, at 7 and 18 months of age.
The researchers found that after taking into account a child's birth
weight, the amount of talking a baby was exposed to at 32 weeks
accounted for 12 percent of differences in children's language
scores and 20 percent of variation in their communication scores at
18 months of age.
The amount of talking a baby was exposed to at 36 weeks also
accounted for about 26 percent of variation in thinking scores at
7 months of age.
Overall, the researchers found that an increased amount of adult
talk in the NICU was tied to higher language and thinking scores on
the tests.
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"To our knowledge, this is the first study showing that early
exposure in the NICU of preterm infants to higher numbers of adult
words is positively correlated with cognitive and language outcomes
after discharge," the researchers write.
"I really think that talking to children is a really good thing
to do," Dr. Heidi Feldman said. "Some of us start when our children
are in utero. Sometimes our children come when they should still be
in utero."
Feldman is the author of "Redesigning Health Care for Children with
Disabilities" and an expert in child development at the Stanford
University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California. She was not
involved with the new study.
She said it's important to understand why children exposed to more
talking did better.
"I think we should pay attention to it, and try to understand it a
little bit better and figure out what the causal mechanisms are,"
Feldman told Reuters Health.
Vohr said her team is currently working on a larger, more rigorous
study to confirm the results.
"With a very sick infant on a ventilator or off a ventilator,
it's a stressful time for families . . . It's an environment that's
not conducive for all moms to do a lot of talking," she said.
"Just informing moms and dads of the importance of this, I think
will make a big difference," she added.
Feldman said it's important to encourage parents to be with their
children when they can to talk and gently touch them in a safe spot,
such as on their earlobe or between their eyebrows.
"To do those kinds of gentle maneuvers and talking softly with the
babies, that would be great," she said, adding that it's also
important to do that when babies are brought home.
"Life is really, really complicated," she said. "If families are
unable to provide for this rich verbal environment in the NICU,
there are still plenty of opportunities to provide that when they
come home."
 ___
Source: http://bit.ly/1om1wZo
Pediatrics, online Feb. 10, 2014.
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