OBJECTIVE To evaluate clinical outcomes, growth and exclusive breastfeeding rates in premature infants assisted by Kangaroo Mother Care at birth, at discharge and at six months of life. METHODS Prospective study of a premature infants cohort assisted by Kangaroo Mother Care in a tertiary public maternity in Northeast Brazil with birth weight ≤1750g and with clinical conditions for Kangaroo ca...

The Kangaroo Program, originally developed in Colombia, was adopted as a public policy by the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) in 2000, in an effort to improve maternal and infant health in the country. This article aims to examine the Kangaroo Program as it is practiced and carried out at a maternity hospital in the northeastern Brazilian region. Through an institutional ethnographic appr...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the influence of the Kangaroo Position duration in the initial interactions between mothers and preterm infants. METHODS This is an exploratory prospective observational study that analyzed the mother-infant interaction during breastfeeding, before hospital discharge. All eligible newborns, with a gestational age of 28-32 weeks and a birth weight of 1,000-1,800 g from Jun...

We report on the development of a planar kangaroo model, which has a tail with two degrees of freedom and a compliant and rolling leg. The full body dynamics of the model are investigated, and it serves as an underlying model for the optimization of leg and tail trajectories. Keywordsmotion optimization, kangaroo, model

OBJECTIVES To describe the implementation of neurodevelopmental care for newborn preterm infants in neonatal ICUs in France in 2011, analyze changes since 2004, and investigate factors associated with practice. DESIGN Prospective national cohort study of all births before 32 weeks of gestation. SETTING Twenty-five French regions. PARTICIPANTS All neonatal ICUs (n = 66); neonates surviving...

BACKGROUND Less than 20% of the 996 NICUs in the United States routinely practice kangaroo care, due in part to the inadequate knowledge and skills confidence of nurses. Continuing education improves knowledge and skills acquisition, but the effects of a kangaroo care certification course on nurses' knowledge and skills confidence are unknown. METHOD A pretest-posttest quasi-experiment was co...

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the heart and respiration rates, mean arterial pressure, temperature and peripheral oxygen saturation of low-weight preterm newborns, before and after the application of kangaroo mother care. Method: Twenty-two healthy low-weight preterm newborns of both sexes were studied. None of them had neurological, cardiac and/or respiratory deficiencies. A...

Scatter-hoarding birds show superior performance in many spatial memory tasks and appear to relocate sites using different cues than nonscatter hoarders. However, there have not been similar studies of cue use and memory for locations by mammals that differ in their reliance on scatter hoards for survival. Here we report differences in spatial memory in two species of kangaroo rats that are pre...

The size of the hippocampus, a forebrain structure that processes spatial information, correlates with the need to relocate food caches by passerine birds and with sex-specific patterns of space use in microtine rodents. The influences on hippocampal anatomy of sexual selection within species, and natural selection between species, have not yet been studied in concert, however. Here we report t...

OBJECTIVE Compared with in utero transport, incubator transport for preterm infants has several disadvantages including instability during transport with increased mortality and morbidity, lack of adequate systems for securing the infant in the event of an accident, and separation of mother and infant. As a new kind of postnatal transportation that bears some analogy to in utero transport and m...