Premature babies are fragile and helpless creatures who have left a cozy and relaxed place to face the outside world in a hurried way. They need our help to get ahead, especially the presence of the mother, something that can hardly be replaced by a webcam.
The closer the baby feels to the mother's warmth, to her breathing, to the beating of her heart, which is what has been deprived of her premature birth, the better.
The Neonatology unit of the University Hospital of the Canary Islands (Tenerife) has been using a therapy based on nannies that have the background of the sound of the heartbeat and that, apparently, help reduce the stress of premature newborns. So to the music, which brings demonstrated benefits to the premature baby, that rhythmic beat is added contributing to its improvement.
This therapy has been applied in 70 premature babies, in which a improvement in your condition, stabilizing their heart and respiratory frequencies, increasing oxygen saturations and decreasing heart rate in cases of neonates with tachycardias. In addition, heartbeat nannies favor sleep and make babies cry less and are less irritable.
All these improvements seem based on the fact that the sound of the heartbeat produces a positive stimulus in the baby, since he is one of those who hears inside his mother. The music is heard twice a day and usually lasts 15-20 minutes, depending on the reaction of the premature child.
The therapy was initiated at the proposal of the Premature Association without Border of Tenerife, emphasizing that it is a method that is already applied in several American hospitals.
For example, in the Children's Hospital Center of Akron of Ohio, in which it has been found that Babies born between 25 and 30 weeks of gestation improve their status with this music therapy, advancing their discharge date about 12 days compared to babies who had not been treated the same way.
Although the therapy is now applied in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the objective is that in the short term it should also be incorporated into the Neonatal Intensive Surveillance Unit, as well as the pediatric UVI of the University Hospital of the Canary Islands. And hopefully if you continue to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, continue to spread to other centers.
