Sleep is important to brain organization, but few strategies to promote sleep in premature infants have been tested. Behaviorally-based measures of sleep have shown increased quiet sleep and decreased active sleep during skin-to-skin contact with the mother, but these results have not been confirmed by objective polysomnographic measures of sleep organization. Data from the first 28 relatively healthy preterm subjects of an ongoing randomized trial of one two-to-three hour session of SSC or incubator care between feedings are reported here. Infants were positioned prone, upright, and nested in an incubator during the 2-to-3 hour pretest period, were fed, and then went into the test period of skin-to-skin contact or incubator care. Infants were left undisturbed throughout testing and a mixed model regression analysis compared the difference from pretest-to-test period scores within and between groups. Results show that arousals in quiet sleep and active sleep and in the test period decrease in the SSC group, rapid eye movement epochs decrease and the percent of indeterminate sleep decrease in the SSC group. When 3 subjects who experienced excessive ambient light levels during SSC were removed from analysis, quiet sleep increased during SSC. The patterns demonstrated by the SSC group are analogous to more mature sleep organization. SSC may be used as an intervention to improve sleep organization in this population of preterm infants.
Session #1182 - Post Partum & Care of Infants
The 29th Annual MNRS Research Conference (April 1-4, 2005)