Researchers focused on a practice known as “kangaroo care,” which has been linked to lower infant mortality and better developmental outcomes for vulnerable babies. Kangaroo care includes skin-to-skin contact between the newborn and mother, exclusive breastfeeding, early discharge from the hospital after delivery and close follow-up care at home.
For the current study, researchers examined data on 228 young adults who had been randomly chosen to receive kangaroo care as part of a study done when they were babies. Charpak and her colleagues compared outcomes for these kids to those of 213 young adults from the infant study who didn’t receive kangaroo care.
Babies that received kangaroo care were 61 percent less likely to die during infancy than newborns who didn’t receive this type of care, the researchers report in Pediatrics.
Breastfeeding rates were higher for the kangaroo care babies than the other infants, the study found. In addition, the infants who got kangaroo care had fewer severe infections requiring hospitalization.
It’s possible some of these outcomes might be the result of kangaroo care’s protective effect on the immature brains of preemies, Charpak said by email. This type of care might foster brain development that occurs late in pregnancy for full-term babies but that doesn’t have a chance to happen before premature infants are born.
Another possibility is that parents who provide kangaroo care also nurture children in other ways that are beneficial to health, social and behavioral outcomes, Charpak added.
One limitation of the study is that it doesn’t prove how kangaroo care may benefit babies, only that there are associations between receiving this treatment and several positive health outcomes, the authors note.
