The baby brain development is significantly enhanced when the mother and premature baby are given emotional support while receiving treatment in an intensive care unit. The baby’s brain network function and future neurocognitive development clearly show the effects.
According to a study done by Columbia University and the University of Helsinki, boosting the emotional bond between the mother and premature baby in the intensive care unit of the hospital after birth helps the baby brain grow.
Professors at Columbia University, Martha G. Welch and Michael M. Myers, have found that strengthening the emotional bond between the mother and child during neonatal intensive care has a big effect on the child’s later brain and behavior development.
In the current study, premature infants’ brain network functions were assessed at term after receiving Family Nurture Intervention (FNI) in the neonatal intensive care unit for about 6 weeks. All premature babies got the same high-quality care, but some families also got extra FNI to help the mother and child feel closer to each other.
The study demonstrates that such parental support during intensive care therapy eliminates the brain function abnormalities that are typically present in premature infants. Infants in the treatment group who were born prematurely had brain networks that functioned similarly to those of their peers who were born at term in the control group.
Although the intensive care unit’s ability to treat premature infants has greatly improved, supporting brain development is still a major problem on a global scale. “Better techniques are required to measure how the new treatments directly impact the developing child’s brain along with treatment innovations,” says the research’s principal investigator, Professor Sampsa Vanhatalo.
New research techniques enable advancements in healthcare by determining the direct impact of novel treatments on the brain.
By term age, the baby brain networks closely matched those of a full-term control group, indicating that FNI had an impact on the development of the baby’s brain networks, according to new analysis techniques for infant brain function. Most importantly, we discovered a connection between these changes and improved neurocognitive development at 18 months, “Pauliina Yrjölä, a PhD researcher who performed the computational analyses, says.
“The most recent research also demonstrates how crucial it is to combine ongoing technical research and development with creative clinical treatment development. Two decades of groundbreaking neuroscience research have been conducted in Helsinki to advance the evaluation of infant brain function, and exceptionally fascinating non-pharmacological research on the care of premature infants has been conducted in New York. The findings provide many new perspectives for both clinical treatment and neuroscience research. ” According to Dr. Anton Tokariev, who oversaw technical development,
Recent studies have introduced a number of strategies to “enrich” the environment of the infant in the neonatal intensive care unit by utilizing particular sensory stimuli like music, massage, or skin contact. A recent study has emphasized the value of natural live interaction between parent and child. Researchers have found that strengthening the emotional bond between a mother and her child has an immediate effect on the brain activity networks that are the foundation of neurocognitive function throughout life.
The intervention is now accessible to everyone, regardless of the resources of the healthcare system or the specific patient, Professor Vanhatalo writes. “From a global point of view, the new findings are particularly interesting.”
