Parental oxytocin responses during skin-to-skin contact in pre-term infants

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

The purpose of the study was to examine oxytocin mechanism in modulating parental stress and anxiety during M-SSC and P-SSC (paternal SSC) with their pre-term infants.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults, both men and women.

Twenty-eight stable pre-term infants and their parents (triads) were recruited in a 2-day cross-over study and 26 mothers and 19 fathers completed the study protocol.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized and crossover study.

Because people in this Oxytocin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Each person switched between Oxytocin and the comparison at some point, usually with a gap in between.

Each triad was randomly assigned to one of the two sequences: M-SSC was conducted on day-1 and P-SSC on day-2; and P-SSC on day-1 and M-SSC on day-2.

Parents' saliva samples for oxytocin and cortisol assays and visual analog anxiety levels were collected pre-SSC, 30-min during-SSC, and 30-min post-SSC.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Anxiety, Fathers, Hydrocortisone, Infant, Premature, Kangaroo-Mother Care Method, Mothers and Oxytocin.

Author keywords: Cortisol, Maternal skin-to-skin contact, Paternal skin-to-skin contact and Pre-term infants.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and crossover study of Oxytocin.

Its findings take up roughly 8 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2015 (Early human development), a journal based in Ireland.

More context: the Oxytocin compound page, all human trials.