New Device Helps Premature Babies Suck Better, Faster -- and That's Good

As if things weren’t tough enough for premature babies who have tubes down their throats and noses to survive, once the tubes are removed, they are often unable to take nourishment orally — that is, suck.

But 20 tube-fed preterm infants with respiratory distress syndrome treated with the NTrainer, a therapeutic device patented by the University of Kansas, rapidly learned to suck far better and transitioned to oral feeding faster than a control group of babies with the syndrome.

Respiratory distress syndrome, also known as hyaline membrane disease, is a common condition of prematurity, particularly in the youngest infants, because babies’ lungs are too immature to survive outside the womb without the help of a ventilator and/or oxygen. Overall, it is the seventh leading cause of death among infants younger than one year, fifth for African-American and third for Hispanic infants.

The results of the study were published in the Journal of Perinatology (Nature) and the Acta Paediatrica journal. The initial clinical trial of the NTrainer at the neonatal intensive care units at Stormont-Vail Regional Health Care in Topeka, Kan. and the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., compared 20 tube-fed preterm infants with moderate-to-severe respiratory distress syndrome treated with the NTrainer to a control group of age-matched respiratory distress syndrome infants who received a sham consisting of a non-instrumented pacifier during tube feedings.

The NTrainer device powers a Soothie silicone pacifier with a computer-controlled air pump to transform the nipple into a dynamically patterned pulsing touch stimulus on the surface of the infant’s lips and tongue. Modeled extensively on the burst-pause suck dynamics of healthy preterm infants, the NTrainer device essentially teaches babies the correct pattern to produce the “non-nutritive suck,” what they normally do in the womb beginning as early as the second trimester of development.

Infants who received the patterned NTrainer treatment exhibited a near doubling of non-nutritive suck burst complexity, a 50 percent to 100 percent increase on select suck burst production measures and a tripling of their average daily oral feed levels to 72.8 percent compared to the untreated controls at 23 percent. The infants were sampled at 38 weeks postmenstrual age – the time between the first day of mother’s last normal menstrual period and the day of the infant’s delivery.

All of the infants quickly learned to bottle feed, one of the main objectives of Stormont-Vail project partners José Gierbolini, medical director of newborn services, and Joy Carlson, neonatal nurse practitioner.

“We were delightfully surprised at the results,” said KU speech-language-hearing professor Steven Barlow, who directed the study. “This demonstrates the potent effect of the patterned NTrainer orocutaneous stimulation to drive and reorganize the rapidly developing nervous system.“