Tag: skin-to-skin

Continuous skin-to-skin contact starting immediately after delivery, even before the baby has been stabilized, can reduce mortality by 25 percent in infants with a very low birth weight. This according to a study in low- and middle-income countries coordinated by the WHO on the initiative of researchers at Karolinska Institutet published in The New England

For premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), skin-to-skin contact with parents influences levels of hormones related to mother-infant attachment (oxytocin) and stress (cortisol) – and may increase parents’ level of engagement with their infants, reports a study in Advances in Neonatal Care, official journal of the National Association of Neonatal Nurses. Promoting

Neonatal intensive care units increasingly encourage meaningful touch and skin-to-skin care—aka “kangaroo care—between parents and premature babies to aid the babies’ development. But a Michigan children’s hospital practicing skin-to-skin care noticed an unwanted side effect in 2016—a spike in Staphylococcus aureus (SA) infections among newborns. Hospital staff hypothesized that the two events were connected and