Babies may get a brain boost in the womb when they hear the voices and heartbeats of their mothers, a new study suggests.
Researchers studying premature babies in the hospital found that the sound centers in the babies' brains grew more quickly when they heard recordings of their mothers rather than the normal clamor of intensive care units. The recordings were manipulated to simulate sounds heard in a womb.
It's not clear what this means in the long run, "but it shows how important it is for mothers to interact with their premature babies when they visit," said study co-author Amir Lahav, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Babies born prematurely often suffer from hearing and language problems, Lahav explained, and the researchers wanted to know more about how they're affected by the weeks they spend in an incubator instead of in their mother's womb.
"Babies begin to hear at 25 weeks' gestation, and they're exposed to the mother's voice and heartbeat," Lahav said. "If you put them inside the incubator for five to six weeks, you're actually depriving them of these maternal exposures to the mother's voice. The incubator is seemingly a wonderful piece of equipment. But at the same time, it's like a social cage."
[For more of this story, written by Randy Dotinga, go to http://medicalxpress.com/news/...-womb-aid-fetal.html]
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