Four Strategies to take care of preterm infants

The birth of infants before 36 weeks of gestation is becoming very common, but this situation cannot be consider a disease, explained Édgar Cortés a physiotherapist and director of the Department of Human Corporal Movement of the Faculty of Medicine of Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Doctor Cortés Reyes also asserted that most preterm infants come from mothers of opposite ages: too young or too mature mothers.

"Some years ago, becoming a mother at the age of 16 was normal, but due to multiple social, cultural, economic factors and professional expectations, this situation has changed and now it is usual to find women wanting to become mothers for the first time after the age of 30. For this reason, we find births of preterm infants in these chronological extremes," asserted the professor from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. According to the professor, these topics are going to be analyzed during the International Workshop and Symposium: Strategies to Promote Brain Development in Preterm Infants Based on Evidence.

In such meeting, programmed on November 9 to 12 by the Department of Human Corporal Movement, four groups of strategies to take care of preterm infants will be proposed.

The first strategy is individual attention, taking into account that this is not a disease. The second is to pay extra attention to stress, since babies are exposed to noise, temperature and light changes.

The third strategy is paying attention to those processes that can be harmful despite of being performed with the best intention. And finally, nesting, that consist in providing the baby the benefits of the biggest proximity to the mother, in particular a temperature according to the baby"s nature.

The purpose of this symposium is to make people aware, specially families and doctors, that this situation can happen and preparations are necessary in order to face it, taking into account that the labor with this infants have to be interdisciplinary; concluded Professor Cortés Reyes,