Relaxing massage for infants
NEW clinical data shows that infant massage can decrease the number of night waking (in babies with sleep problems) by about a third, says Dr Judith Owens, Associate Professor of Paediatrics at Brown Medical School and director of Paediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Rhode Island, United States.
The Infant Massage Study was conducted at Brown Medical School on 45 babies who had difficulties falling asleep at bedtime for at least three weeks.
Sharing early findings of the study at a press conference in Singapore recently, Dr Owens says: “We selected nine- to 15-months-old babies who had difficulty falling asleep and experience night wakings for three weeks. We had a control group, a group with sleep training and another group with sleep training and infant massage.”
In the control group, the night wakings increased a little bit. With the sleep training without massage group there was a reduction in the number of night wakings. However, it wasn’t statistically significant compared with the control group.
The massage group showed a statistically significant difference from the control group by about a third.
The study also found that mothers are “very happy” with the infant massage technique. “They feel very satisfied that the massage doesn’t put additional pressure on them. It’s been a mutually beneficial intervention for mother and baby,” she says.
Infant massage is believed to shorten the time for babies to fall asleep. Most importantly, it is thought to reduce night waking in babies who have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep.
Baby experts, she says, expect “positive” benefits of massage on infant sleep and daytime benefits in terms of behaviour. This in turn would have secondary positive effects on the mother’s well-being. They also want to look at parental satisfaction of massage versus other techniques.
Infant massage is a common practice in many cultures although not so much in the United States. It involves a full body moderate pressure massage for 15 minutes at bedtime. It is becoming a popular technique in different paediatric populations and can have important medical, psychological as well as emotional benefits.
A study on infant massage was supported by a grant from Johnson & Johnson. Baby experts are still in the process of gathering data that looks at infant massage in a scientific way.
Dr Owens, who is a member of Paediatric Sleep Task Force of the National Sleep Foundation in the United States, says a group of paediatricians from the Asia-Pacific region are in the process of adapting infant guidelines for healthy sleep that are put together by Johnson & Johnson and the US National Sleep Foundation. They want to adapt the guidelines for different cultures and hopefully make them available soon.
Related stories:
Monitoring habitual snoring in children
RSS
