Separation from mother 'stressful for newborns'

Washington, Nov 3 (ANI): Separating an infant from its mother after birth, which is a standard practice in hospitals, is stressful for the baby, a new study has found.

Researchers at the American Academy of Paediatrics measured the heart rate variability in 2-day-old sleeping babies for one hour each during skin-to-skin contact with mother and alone in a cot next to mother's bed.

They found that neonatal autonomic activity was 176 percent higher and quiet sleep 86 percent lower during maternal separation compared to skin-to-skin contact.

"This paper highlights the profound impact of maternal separation on the infant. We knew that this was stressful, but the current study suggests that this is major physiologic stressor for the infant," Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, said.

The research addresses a strange contradiction, as, in animal research, separation from mother is a common way of creating stress in order to study its damaging effects on the developing newborn brain. Skin-to-skin contact with mother removes this contradiction, and our results are a first step towards understanding exactly why babies do better when nursed in skin-to-skin contact with mother, compared to incubator care," Dr. Barak Morgan, author of the study, said.

The study has been published in Biological Psychiatry. (ANI)