Talking to Premature Babies Tied to Later Development

By Andrew M. Seaman

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Babies born prematurely may benefit from people talking to them while they are still in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), a new study suggests.

Researchers found that premature babies who were exposed to more talking from adults, such as their parents, in the NICU, tended to score higher on development tests later on.

"This is certainly a remarkable, easy-to-implement and cost-effective intervention," said senior author Dr. Betty Vohr from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

She and her colleagues noted in their paper in Pediatrics, online February 10, that preemies in a NICU are exposed to noises from monitors and machines but little talk.

Previous research has found that children born early are at an increased risk for language problems later on, but it's unknown whether talking to them early on will help their later scores.

For the new study, the researchers recruited families of 36 babies that were medically stable but born before 32 weeks and kept in the NICU.

The babies wore vests equipped with devices that recorded and analyzed nearby conversations and background noises over 16 hours. The recordings were taken at 32 and 36 weeks of gestational age.

Overall, the babies were exposed to more talking at 36 weeks than at 32 weeks, but the actual amount of talk each baby was exposed to during the study periods varied from 144 words to over 26,000 words.

At seven and 18 months of age, those word tallies were compared to babies' Bayley-III scores, which measure motor, language and thinking skills.

The researchers found that after taking into account a child's birth weight, the amount of talking a baby was exposed to at 32 weeks accounted for 12% of differences in children's language scores and 20% of variation in their communication scores at 18 months of age.

The amount of talking a baby was exposed to at 36 weeks also accounted for about 26% of variation in thinking scores at seven months of age.

Overall, the researchers found that an increased amount of adult talk in the NICU was tied to higher language and thinking scores on the tests.

"To our knowledge, this is the first study showing that early exposure in the NICU of preterm infants to higher numbers of adult words is positively correlated with cognitive and language outcomes after discharge," the researchers write.

"I really think that talking to children is a really good thing to do," Dr. Heidi Feldman said. "Some of us start when our children are in utero. Sometimes our children come when they should still be in utero."

Feldman is the author of "Redesigning Health Care for Children with Disabilities" and an expert in child development at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California. She was not involved with the new study.

She said it's important to understand why children exposed to more talking did better.

"I think we should pay attention to it, and try to understand it a little bit better and figure out what the causal mechanisms are," Feldman told Reuters Health.

Vohr said her team is currently working on a larger, more rigorous study to confirm the results.

"With a very sick infant on a ventilator or off a ventilator, it's a stressful time for families . . . It's an environment that's not conducive for all moms to do a lot of talking," she said.

"Just informing moms and dads of the importance of this, I think will make a big difference," she added.

Feldman said it's important to encourage parents to be with their children when they can, to talk and gently touch them in a safe spot, such as on their earlobe or between their eyebrows.

"To do those kinds of gentle maneuvers and talking softly with the babies, that would be great," she said, adding that it's also important to do that when babies are brought home.

"Life is really, really complicated," she said. "If families are unable to provide for this rich verbal environment in the NICU, there are still plenty of opportunities to provide that when they come home."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1om1wZo Pediatrics 2014.

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