Improbable research: kangaroo care and live music

Does it benefit premature babies to be held close up to their mother while listening to the strains of a harp?

Marc Abrahams

guardian.co.uk, Monday 12 September 2011 16.30 BST

You might think that an Israeli Medical Association report called Combining Kangaroo Care and Live Harp Music Therapy in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Setting is the first medical study of the combined effects, on newborns, of kangaroo care and music therapy. Not so.

The invention of kangaroo care (also called kangaroo therapy) is widely attributed to a pair of doctors in Colombia in the late 1970s. Initially, both the idea and the name triggered scepticism. Thus the appearance in 1990 of a paper called Kangaroo Care: Not a Useless Therapy, in a magazine published by America's National Association of Neonatal Nurses.

The idea of kangaroo care is for premature babies to spend most of their time being held or pressed against the mother, the two maintaining direct "skin-to-skin" contact. This was meant as a substitute for incubators in places where those were unavailable. Later, some doctors and nurses began recommending that even the most modern hospitals adopt the practice.

Eventually came attempts to see whether – or not – kangaroo care produces good effects. Research journals began publishing studies, including the provocative Kangaroo Care Modifies Preterm Infant Heart Rate Variability in Response to Heel Stick Pain: Pilot Study.

Then someone got the idea of adding music. Researchers at several institutions in Taiwan combined forces to performed an experiment, documented in a 2006 paper, Randomised Controlled Trial of Music During Kangaroo Care on Maternal State Anxiety and Preterm Infants' Responses, in the International Journal of Nursing Studies.

The Taiwan experimenters had mothers and premature babies snuggle skin-to-skin while listening to recorded music emanated, for 60 minutes, from a Philips AZ-1103 ghetto-blaster. At the same time, other mothers and preemies neither snuggled skin-to-skin nor heard recorded music.

The researchers found that the kangaroo'ed babies slept a bit more than the non-kangaroo'ed babies, and cried a bit less. And, they say, the kangarooing mothers gradually felt ever-so-slightly lessened anxiety.

As for the babies' health – the main reason people recommend kangaroo care – they reported "no significant difference on infants' physiologic responses" between those who got kangarooing and music, and those who did not.

The new Israeli kangaroo-plus-harp-music study also reports that their particular "combined therapy had no apparent effect on the tested infants' physiological responses or behavioural state".

But a similar study – which the Israeli study does not mention – done in Finland and published online a year earlier by the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy reported that kangaroo therapy accompanied by live harp music "did" affect the medical state of the child. The Finns say that it "decreased the pulse, slowed down the respiration and increased the transcutaneous O₂ saturation", and "affected the blood pressure significantly".

And so doctors and nurses must await further research before they know the value of prescribing kangaroo care with live harp music.

(Thanks to Andrea Halpern for bringing this to my attention.)

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
• This article was amended on 13 September to include a credit at the end

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