Very Premature Babies Get Help From Music For Building Their Brains

Each year, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the HUG welcomes 80 premature children between 24 and 32 weeks of pregnancy which is almost four months ahead of schedule for some of them. Majority will survive, but half later develops neurodevelopmental disorders, comprising learning difficulties, attentional or emotional disorders. The brain of these babies at birth is still immature. Therefore, brain development must continue in the intensive care unit, in an incubator, under unique conditions than if they were still in their mother's womb. This is explained by Petra Hüppi who is a professor at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine and Head of the HUG Development and Growth Division. He is the one who directed this work. He said that brain immaturity when combined with a disturbing sensory environment, explains the reason of neural networks not developing normally.

The Geneva researchers initiated from a very practical idea: since the neural deficits of premature babies are due, at least in part, to stressful stimuli as well as to stimuli lack adapted to their condition, their environment must be enriched with the introduction of pleasant and structuring stimuli. The hearing system is functional early on therefore; music appeared to be a good candidate. But which music? Petra said that luckily, they met the composer Andreas Vollenweider, who had already conducted musical projects with fragile populations and showed great interest in the creation of music suitable for premature children.

Lara Lordier who has done PhD in neurosciences and is a researcher at the HUG and UNIGE, unfolds the process of musical creation. She said that it was important that these musical stimuli were related to the condition of the baby. They wanted to structure the day with pleasant stimuli at appropriate times: music for accompanying their awakening, music for accompanying their falling asleep, and music for interacting during the awakening phases. To select instruments which are suitable for these very young patients, Andreas Vollenweider played many types of instruments to the babies, in the presence of a nurse specialized in developmental support care. The instrument which generated the most reactions was the Indian snake charmers' flute (the punji), recalls Lara Lordier. She said that very agitated children calmed down almost instantly as their attention was drawn to the music. The composer thus has written three sound environments of eight minutes each, with punji, harp and bells pieces.

The study took place in a double-blind study, with a group of premature infants who listened to the music. This group is a control group of premature infants, and a control group of full-term newborns. They assess whether the brain development of premature infants who had listened to the music would be same to that of full-term babies. Scientists utilized functional MRI at rest on all three groups of infants. Without music, premature babies generally got poorer functional connectivity between brain areas than full-term babies. This confirms the negative effect of prematurity.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190528095220.htm