No abstract

This clinical trial tested the pain relieving effect of live lullaby singing on behavioral and physiological pain responses during venepuncture in 38 preterm and full term neonates. Acute and repeated pain, as well as the use of analgesic drugs, may have long-term negative impact on infants’ development and future behaviour. This emphasizes the need for complementary approaches to pain management such as music therapy. Parent-preferred lullabies were performed live and standard care was provided for all neonates. Behavioral responses with regard to pain were assessed with Premature Infant Pain Profile-Revised (PIPP-R) and Behavioral Indicators of Infant Pain (BIIP). Heart rate, respiratory rate and oxygen saturation were measured each tenth second.Although the live lullaby singing did not show a statistically significant effect on the infants’ pain score, there was a significantly calmer breathing pattern in the lullaby intervention versus the control condition in the pre-needle stage, showing a non-significant trend towards higher oxygen saturation levels and calmer heart rate in the lullaby intervention versus the control condition in the pre-needle stage. There were non-significant indications of fewer and shorter skin punctures with lullaby singing. More research is needed to explore such positive trends in the data.Keywords: newborn infant, preterm infant, pain, music therapy, lullaby

As the human auditory system is highly malleable in infancy, perinatal risk factors, such as preterm birth, may affect auditory development. In comparison to healthy full-term infants, preterm infants show abnormal auditory brain responses at term age, which may have long-term detrimental outcomes. To achieve an optimal neonatal care environment for preterm-born infants, many early interventions have been developed. Musical interventions developed for neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) have shown beneficial effects on vital functions and weight gain of preterm infants and might also influence basic auditory processing and thereby enhance outcomes. In the present study, we tested the effect of parental singing during kangaroo care on auditory processing of standardized audio stimuli. Preterm infants (born between 24 and 32 weeks of gestation) were randomized to singing intervention (n = 13) or control (n = 8) groups. The auditory processing was tested using two audio paradigms assessed with magnetoencephalography (MEG) at term corresponding age. To verify that the paradigms elicit responses in MEG, we studied 12 healthy full-term infants. In the singing intervention group, parents were instructed by a music therapist twice a week for 4 weeks to sing or hum during kangaroo care in an infant-directed way. The control group received standard kangaroo care. The results show that the infants in the singing intervention group show larger neural responses than those in the control group when controlling for the total amount of singing during kangaroo care. Our findings suggest that incorporating singing into kangaroo care may be beneficial for preterm infants, but the effect may not be due to exposure to singing but instead positive parenting, improved parental self-esteem and improved caregiver sensitivity.