Kangaroo mother care can reduce infant death rate: Research

Co-author Dr. Grace Chan said in a statement that skin-to-skin care is particularly beneficial for low-birth-weight babies where medical resources are limited. Now scientists have found that kangaroo-style infant care indeed dramatically reduces the risk of the newborn dying prematurely.

Kangaroo care may help human infants because, like all mammalian young, these babies develop their physiological systems in the context of the mother’s body, said Ruth Feldman, a researcher at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

For newborns who do not require emergency interventions directly after birth, the best place to be is on their mother’s chest, skin to skin.

Furthermore, these results were consistent across low-, middle- and high-income countries, prompting the researchers to declare that KMC practice is beneficial for all newborns and mothers.

Continuous skin-to-skin contact between mother and infant during the first few days of life has been found to improve the survival rates for infants with low birth weight.

They looked at newborns weighing 4.4 pounds or less who survived long enough to receive the skin-to-skin contact. Siobhan Dolan, MD, medical advisor, March of Dimes, commented, “Kangaroo care helps by improving preemies’ body temperature regulation, and by stabilizing their heart and breathing rates, but, we may not even know every pathway, medically, that it’s working though”.

One shortcoming of the study is that the researchers couldn’t tell whether, or to what extent, specific aspects of kangaroo care, such as skin-to-skin contact or breastfeeding, were linked to the benefits.

According to the team – which is led Grace Chan, instructor at Harvard and a faculty member at Boston Children’s Hospital – each year, 4 million babies worldwide die during their first month of life; those born early or at a low birth weight are particularly vulnerable.

Children born pre-term or have low birth weight, have increased risk of death, serious illness, developmental delays and chronic diseases.

She also goes on to note that part of the research was also meant to help demonstrate the benefits of KMC to health providers and policy-makers in order to help standardize the practice.

As a result, doctors recommend mothers in these countries utilize “kangaroo mother care” – or skin to skin contact – to protect their babies.

In 68 percent of the 124 studies included in the analysis, the authors defined kangaroo mother care as continuous and prolonged skin-to-skin contact between the newborn and the mother. The positive impact was also noticed in case of heavier or full-term babies.

As per experts, this type of infant are includes skin-to-skin contact between the newborn and mother, breastfeeding, early discharge from the health facility after delivery and close follow-up care at home.

Complete details of the meta-analysis have been published in the online issue of journal Pediatrics.