Associations Between Nurse-Guided Variables and Plasma Oxytocin Trajectories in Premature Infants During Initial Hospitalization.
Ashley Weber, Tondi M Harrison, Loraine Sinnott and 2 others
PMID 29337699WHAT IT FOUND
In preterm infants, skin-to-skin contact before sampling was associated with plasma oxytocin, while mother's milk volume, swaddled holding, and weekly touch were not.
Stressor exposure and total feed volume lost significance in the final model.
Key findings
01Skin-to-skin contact before sampling was associated with plasma oxytocin, while swaddled holding before sampling was not.
02Mother's milk volume was not associated with plasma oxytocin.
03In the final model, skin-to-skin contact remained significant, while enteral feed volume and stressor exposure became nonsignificant.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The analysed subset was small and came from a convenience sample in a limited geographic region. This was a secondary analysis without a priori power for the exposures examined here. The study was observational, so infants were not randomised to different amounts of milk, touch, or stressors. Oxytocin was not measured immediately before and after touch, feeding, or stressful procedures. Several associations that were significant in separate models lost significance in the final model. Many infants were very fragile or ventilated, and some had weeks without holding, limiting how the touch findings apply.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest or commercial interests.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that skin-to-skin contact causes oxytocin release or improves infant development. This was an observational association in a small sample, and other exposures were null or lost significance in the final model.