To Örebro University

Introduction & Aims: Skin-to-skin contact originated as a life-saving alternative to conventional neonatal care in low-resource settings. Later research has focused on its advantages for e.g. breastfeeding, mother-infant attachment and also for pain-relief. This study is a part of a larger bibliometric project, analyzing neonatal pain research from 2000 to 2012, as a follow up of a previous investigation (1).

Methods: PubMed, PsychInfo, Cochrane, and EBSCO databases were searched using terms relating to pain, neonatal care, infancy, skin-to-skin contact and kangaroo mother care. In addition literature was searched from personal knowledge, reference lists in retrieved articles and from the International Network of Kangaroo Care Bibliography (2). The articles in the final inclusion were analyzed according to publication data and type of  research and also type of pain.

Results: A final number of 87 articles were included in the analysis. Publication rate increased from an average of 2.5 articles per year the first 5-year period; 2000-2004, to 8.2 2005-2009 and 12.0 2010-2012. Eighty-eight per-cents were published in English language and the main publishing countries were USA with 34 % and Canada with 24 % of the articles. Randomized controlled trials constituted 33 % of the included articles, followed by 14 % other original research. Twenty per-cents were systematic reviews and 34 % guidelines, position papers or commentaries. The most common topic for the studies were procedural pain (61 %) followed by general pain issues (32 %). Of the first authors,  62 % were nurses and 28 % physicians.

Discussion & Conclusions: Research about skin-to-skin contact as pain relieving measure shows an increasing trend over the last decade, both randomized trials and other original research, which is also seen in the increasing number of reviews and guidelines built on the results of this scientific work. The large proportion of nurses performing skin-to-skin contact research shows that skin-to-skin contact is a multi-professional team-based intervention. A next step would be to study compliance with the guidelines and the implementation process of skin-to-skin contact for pain-relief.

References

1. Baños, J. E., Ruiz, G., & Guardiola, E. (2001). An analysis of articles on neonatal pain published from 1965 to 1999. Pain Res Manag, 6(1), 45-50.

2. Ludington-Hoe, S. Kangaroo Care Bibliography. Available at http://www.kangaroocareusa.org/uploads/KCBIB2012_May.pdf

The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.