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NRL News
Premature
Babies’ Pain Reduced by Music When Mark Tramo’s daughter Cadence was born three weeks prematurely, doctors inserted a feeding tube. But Tramo wanted to see if she would eat if he fed her himself. “I arrived on the scene around three in the morning and I said ‘No, no, no. I’ll try and feed Cadence,’” he told Nightline. “So I kind of palmed her and held her in my hand. And started feeding her and like a lot of songs you write it just comes to you. So I started singing ‘Bright, bright world, clear, clear day, I’m a little baby drinking.’” Cadence responded to her father’s music, and she did not need to use a feeding tube again. Most parents would keep this story as a beautiful memory, but Tramo can apply it to his work. He is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School—as well as a musician and a songwriter—who studies the effect of music on the human brain. “Music is in our genes,” says Tramo told the Harvard Gazette. “Many researchers like myself are trying to understand melody, harmony, rhythm, and the feelings they produce, at the level of individual brain cells. At this level, there may be a universal set of rules that governs how a limited number of sounds can be combined in an infinite number of ways.” His experience with his daughter is consistent with another experiment he conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children to determine if lullabies could reduce the pain of medical procedures in newborns. Blood is routinely drawn from babies through their heels, which is very painful. Tramo played music to the babies after the procedure, and found that their heart rate slowed markedly. “What we did was find that traditional Western lullabies were able to decrease the stress and pain response to procedures,” he told Nightline. “Relative to a control group, more than twice as much.” Nightline reporters saw Tramo’s theory in action at Massachusetts General. Nurses performed a heel stick test on a premature baby less than a day old. “The baby started crying, and the heart rate went up when the heel was punctured,” Tramo said on Nightline. “The heart rate went up about 10 beats per minute. And you could see the stress—this baby’s stress response included crying.” After the test was over, a speaker in the incubator played a quiet song. The baby’s heart rate slowed. “So our study showed the heart rate went down more than twice as much after the heel stick if they got music than if they didn’t,” said Tramo. “In the realm of measurements we make, more than twice as much is a big effect.” Others are also studying the effect of music on premature babies, some suggesting that it may help them to be released from intensive care sooner. “There’s some terrific data that’s been published in nursing journals,” Tramo told Nightline. “And what their data show thus far is babies gain weight faster and stay in the intensive care unit environment a shorter time if they are receiving some kind of calibrated structured sound, vis a vis music.” |