review · International Breastfeeding Journal
Kangaroo mother care involves skin-to-skin contact and is a widely recognised intervention for preterm and low birthweight infants to decrease neonatal morbidity and mortality. This meta-analysis evaluated eight randomised controlled trials identified from major electronic databases to determine the pooled mean time to initiate breastfeeding. Across the analysed studies, the overall pooled mean time to begin breastfeeding was 2.6 days. Compared to conventional care involving radiant warmers or incubators, infants receiving kangaroo mother care initiated breastfeeding two days, 14 hours, and 24 minutes earlier. These findings demonstrate that kangaroo mother care substantially accelerates the onset of breastfeeding for vulnerable newborns. Consequently, healthcare facilities caring for premature and low birthweight infants are advised to implement kangaroo mother care as standard practice over conventional methods.
Early breastfeeding initiation is critical for infant survival, development, and the reduction of neonatal complications. By confirming that kangaroo mother care allows preterm and low birthweight infants to breastfeed more than two days sooner than incubator-based care, this evidence provides healthcare providers and hospital administrators with clear justification to integrate skin-to-skin practices into routine neonatal care protocols.
This evidence directly informs hospital clinical guidelines and training programmes for neonatal units, rather than a proprietary product. Intended users are maternity staff, paediatric clinicians, and healthcare managers. The intervention is applied and tested, meaning adoption relies on healthcare policy changes, facility-level protocol adoption, and low-cost supportive materials for mothers, rather than lengthy technical development.
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Kangaroo mother care is a comprehensive intervention given for all newborns especially for premature and low birthweight infants. It is the most feasible and preferred intervention for decreasing neonatal morbidity and mortality. Even though time to initiating breastfeeding has been examined by randomized controlled trials, varying findings have been reported. Therefore, the main objective of this meta-analysis was to estimate the pooled mean time to initiate breastfeeding among preterm and low birthweight infants. The authors searched for randomized controlled trial studies conducted on the effects of kangaroo mother care on the time to breastfeeding initiation among preterm and low birthweight infants. Published articles were identified through a computerized search of electronic databases that includes MEDLINE via PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL and CENTRAL. The search terms were kangaroo mother care or (skin to skin), or conventional care, newborns, preterm infants, low birthweight infants and randomized controlled trial. A total of 467 eligible titles were identified and eight studies met the inclusion criteria. The extracted data were entered and analyzed using Cochrane Review Manager-5-3 software. Heterogeneity across studies was evaluated by Chi2 test and inconsistency index (I2). Publication bias was assessed using a funnel plot. The random effect model was applied to estimate the pooled mean time to initiate breastfeeding with 95% confidence interval. In this meta-analysis, the overall pooled mean time to initiate breastfeeding was 2.6 days (95% CI 1.23, 3.96). Preterm and low birthweight infants receiving kangaroo mother care intervention initiated breastfeeding 2 days 14 h 24 min earlier than conventional care of radiant warmer/incubator method. Kangaroo mother care promotes early initiation of breastfeeding as compared to conventional care method. Therefore, health facilities need to implement the kangaroo mother care for preterm and low birthweight infants.
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DOI: 10.1186/s13006-019-0206-0
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