Premature babies may have difficulty speaking later in life, but simple interventions can help.
BSIP SA/Alamoy
Playing recordings of their mother's voice to premature babies may help their brains mature faster, according to the first randomized controlled trial of this simple intervention. This approach may ultimately improve language consequences for children born too early.
Premature birth is associated with changes in brain structures that are associated with language difficulties, sometimes jeopardizing future communication and academic performance. The sound of a mother's voice and her heartbeat may stimulate development of pathways associated with hearing and language skills. But a parent cannot always be with the baby or keep him in the neonatal ward.
To find out if their presence can be simulated using recording, Catherine Travis at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and her colleagues enrolled 46 premature babies born between 24 and 31 weeks of gestation while they were in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Mothers recorded themselves reading passages from a children's book. A bear named Paddington. Half of the babies were then played a 10-minute audio clip twice an hour from 10pm to 6am, increasing baby's exposure to the mother's voice by an average of 2.7 hours each day until the original due date. The remaining babies received the same care, but without records.
When the babies reached term, they had two types of MRI scans that showed how organized and connected they were. brain there were networks. The scans showed that those who heard their mother's voice at night had stronger and more organized connections in and around the left arcuate fasciculus, one of the main areas supporting language processing. “It was more mature,” Travis says. “Its structure is more similar to what we would expect to see in an older or more developed infant.”
The scans also suggest that this maturation may be caused by increased myelination – the formation of fatty sheaths that insulate nerve fibers and help signals travel faster and more efficiently through the brain. “Myelination is a key aspect of healthy brain development, especially in pathways that support communication and learning,” says Travis.
Previous studies linked developmental delays in these brain regions to later speech and learning difficulties. The new findings hint that targeted speech intervention may help improve these outcomes.
But was there anything particularly important about babies hearing their mother rather than someone else's voice? This study did not answer this question, but previous studies have shown how Children begin to hear from about 24 weeks of pregnancy.And constant exposure to mother's voice It is believed that in the womb they explain why, after birth, they prefer this voice to other voices. “This is the most familiar and biologically significant voice for a baby,” says Travis. “Because this voice is ingrained before birth, it may be of particular interest to the developing brain.”
However, she said, speech variability is also important for language development, so it's possible that speech from other caregivers could provide similar benefits. The team intends to explore this idea in future studies.
The intervention is simple and can be easily added to a system of care. However, David Edwards Evelina London Children's Hospital warns that the results should not be over-interpreted. “It's a very small sample size, and I think more control groups are needed—other sources of speech, other forms of auditory stimulation, other forms of overstimulation,” he says.
Travis and her team now hope to confirm the results in larger studies and in infants, who are more medically vulnerable. They will also follow current participants to see whether the observed differences in the brain lead to meaningful improvements in language and communication skills as they grow.
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