Infant massage may help young babies

Young children and babies too may find comfort from gentle massage, especially if they are stressed out. Infant massage has long been used in many Asian and African cultures to ease their colic and fussiness, help them sleep, and even aid their growth and development. There is growing interest in infant massage among parents in Western countries as well. To assess the science behind the practice, the researchers from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England analysed 23 clinical trials in which infants younger than 6 months were randomly assigned to receive massage or not. The trials included in the review were conducted in China, North America, Great Britain and Israel, and included 598 healthy, full-term infants. In some studies, researchers provided the massage, while parents did it in others. Most studies looked at the effects of daily massage over a period of weeks. They found that across nine of the studies, gentle massage appeared to improve infants' sleep patterns, eased crying, and strengthened the mother-child bonding. Some studies found that massage lowered babies' levels of certain stress hormones. On the other hand, nine studies showed no benefits for infants' growth and development. And the researchers considered the rest of the 23 trials to have a high risk of bias because of concerns about their methodology; some reports, for instance, lacked information about how the study was designed and conducted. Overall, the results offer tentative support for teaching parents and caregiver's infant massage - though there's not enough evidence to universally recommend the practice.