[ad_1]
Listen to the sound of his mother’s voice promotes the development of language pathways in a premature baby’s brain, according to a new study led by Stanford Medicine (USA).
During the study, which is published in ‘Frontiers in Human Neuroscience‘, premature babies hospitalized They regularly listened to recordings of their mothers reading to them At the end of the study, brain MRIs showed that a key language pathway was more mature than in premature babies in a control group who did not listen to the recordings. This is the first randomized controlled trial of this type of intervention in early development.
“This is the first causal evidence that the experience of speech contributes to brain development at this early age,” says lead author Dr. Katherine Traviswho was an associate professor at Stanford Medicine when the study was conducted and is now an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and the Burke Neurological Institute (USA). “This is a potentially transformative way of thinking about how to approach neonatal care to promote better language outcomes in preterm infants.”
Premature babies – born at least three weeks early – typically spend weeks or months in the hospital, and usually return home around their due date. During hospitalization, they listen less to their mother’s speech than if they had continued their intrauterine development. Parents are usually not able to stay in the hospital 24 hours a day; For example, they may have older children in their care or jobs to which they must return. Premature babies are at risk for language delays, and scientists suspect that less early exposure to speech sounds contributes to the problem.
The researchers decided increase the exposure of premature babies to their mothers’ voices during hospitalization. To do this, they played recordings of the mothers speaking, a total of 2 hours and 40 minutes a day, for a few weeks at the end of their hospitalization.
“The babies were exposed to this intervention for a relatively short period of time,” said study co-author Dr. Melissa Scala, clinical professor of pediatrics and neonatologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. “Despite this, we observe very measurable differences in their linguistic tracts. “It’s shocking that something relatively small seems to make a big difference.”
Fetal hearing begins to develop shortly after mid-pregnancy, around 24 weeks of what is normally a 40-week gestation period. As the fetus grows, the uterus expands and the uterine wall thins. In the later stages of pregnancy, the fetus receives more sounds, including the mother’s conversations. At birth, full-term newborns recognize their mother’s voice and prefer the sounds of their parents’ native language over other languages, previous research has shown.
These factors suggest that listening mother’s voice contributes to brain maturation in the second half of a full-term pregnancy. “The body is not going to waste energy developing hearing so early if it is not doing something important to program the brain,” explains Scala.
The researchers realized that by supplementing the sounds that premature babies heard in the hospital to resemble those they would have heard in the womb, they had a unique opportunity to possibly improve brain development at this stage of life.
The 46 babies in the study were born very premature, more than eight weeks early. Babies were able to join the study when they were medically stable and had moved from the neonatal intensive care unit, where the most seriously ill newborns receive care, to the neonatal intermediate care unit, where they remain until they are ready to go home. The babies in the study had no congenital anomalies nor had they experienced serious complications from premature birth.
The researchers recorded the mothers reading a chapter from Paddington Bear, a children’s book translated into many languages. Each mother recorded a recording for her baby in her native language.
The babies were randomly assigned to the treatment group (who listened to their mothers’ voice recordings) or the control group (who did not listen to them). In the treatment group, the recordings were played overnight in 10-minute periods, for a total of 160 minutes each night. By playing the recordings at night, the researchers prevented parents from knowing which group their babies were in, thus ensuring that their behavior did not affect the results. The recordings did not appear to interfere with the babies’ sleep, according to the researchers, noting that fetuses at the same stage of development often sleep while their mothers are awake and talking.
The babies underwent brain MRIs as part of routine health checks before hospital discharge. The scans included images of the arcuate fascicles in both brain hemispheres, which contain large bundles of nerve fibers that help process and understand sound. The left arcuate fasciculus is specialized for language processing.
In the brain scans, the researchers observed a significant difference in the white matter of the left arcuate fasciculus: this language processing pathway was more mature in babies in the treatment group than in those in the control group. The right arcuate fasciculus was less affected by the treatment, which is consistent with known differences in speech processing between both brain hemispheres, according to the scientists.
“I was surprised by the strength of the effect,” Travis summarizes. “The fact that we can detect differences in brain development so early suggests that what we are doing in the hospital is important. Exposure to speech influences brain development.”
Researchers are planning new studies to test whether the benefits extend to babies with medical complications and are exploring in more detail how voice recordings exert their effects. Scala also leads a team at the Packard Children’s Hospital that is creating personalized plans for patients so that the sounds premature babies hear in the hospital’s NICU are the most conducive to promoting brain development.
[ad_2]
Source link
