OXYGEN SATURATION (SaO2) IN ILL NEONATES IS IMPROVED BY MOTHER'S VOICE AND OTHER SOUNDS. † 1246

Term infants respond to mother's voice, and muffling of noise has been shown to calm ill neonates and improve SaO2. To see how various sounds affect the SaO2 of ill neonates, we played five tapes for 10 minutes each, in random order, to 10 neonates, 30 to 32 weeks post-conceptional, with apnea and supplemental oxygen dependence. Tapes were: the mother rading a standard poetry text (“mom”), lullabies sung by a female vocalist(“song”), white noise (“noise”), sounds made to simulate the intrauterine environment (“uterus”), and a blank(“silent”). Each non-silent tape was adjusted to 75 dB. Tapes were played via headphones, with the clinical observers blinded as to tape content and order. We followed pulse-ox SaO2, heart rate, respirations, apnea >20 secs, and episodes of SaO2 <88% (desats). There were no differences among tapes except that mean SaO2 was significantly higher for the four non-silent tapes compared to silence, which was no different from baseline (repeated measures ANOVA p=.01, Newman-Keuls p=.05*). We conclude that ill prematures at 30 - 32 weeks respond differently to certain sounds than to silence, by increasing SaO2. We speculate that immaturity accounts for the lack of differences among the various tested sounds. Table