Comparing the Effect of Kangaroo Mother Care and Massage on Preterm Infant Pain Score, Stress, Anxiety, Depression, and Stress Coping Strategies of Their Mothers

The need to care for premature infants causes a lot of anxiety and stress in their mothers. This study aimed to compare the effect of kangaroo mother care and Preterm infant massage on pain score, stress, anxiety, depression, and stress coping strategies of their mothers. This double-blind three-group clinical trial study was conducted in Bahar Hospital in Shahroud, Iran, in 2019. 90 Mothers with preterm infants were assigned randomly to one of the three groups. Each group consisted of 30 mothers. The massage group received three 5-min massages each day for five consecutive days. In the Kangaroo Mother Care group, the baby remained in skin to skin condition for at least 15 minutes or more during five consecutive days. The control group received only routine care in the neonatal intensive care unit. Data in all three groups were collected before and after the interventions using the Coping Responses Inventory for Adult (CRI-A), the Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scale 21, and Neonatal Infant Pain Scale. The Paired Sample T-Test revealed that the mean score of infant pain in both intervention groups before and after the intervention was statistically significant (P<0.001). The ANOVA test and The Paired Sample T-Test also showed that the mean scores of depression, Emotion-focused coping, and problem solving-based coping in mothers in all three groups, were significantly different before and after the intervention (P<0.001). Kangaroo mother care and massage can reduce the pain in preterm infants, as well as the level of anxiety, depression, and stress of mothers; and increase the strategies to deal with stress in mothers. Due to the high prevalence of birth trauma in infants in Iran, therefore, interventions are recommended to reduce it. Further studies on the factors affecting it need to be done to appropriate interventions to reduce it