The United States spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to sustain low-birth-weight infants with incubators and other sophisticated equipment. Yet until now medical wizards have not come up with a successful low-birth-weight version of something that long has been a source of daily comfort for normal-size babies: the decidedly low-technology pacifier.
Maternal-child nurses at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston received a patent for a tiny pacifier designed specially for low-birth-weight babies.The device looks very different from a normal pacifier, whose rubber nipple is often stout and flat. The new pacifier, in one piece and made of silicon, is long and skinny and resembles an infant's thumb.
Low-birth-weight babies often are not able to take bottles because they have not mastered the art of sucking.
The idea for the pacifier arose out of discussions among maternal-child nurses about problems in caring for low-birthweight infants, many of whom do not have the strength or coordination to bring their thumbs to their mouths.
So Joan C. Engebretson and a colleague, Diane W. Wardell, both associate professors of nursing, received a technology grant from the state of Texas to develop the pacifier.
"It sounded like an easy thing, but when you do anything for those tiny little babies it's never simple," Engebretson said.
With the help of a pediatric dentist, the nurses made a mold of a 2-pound infant's mouth and then of the baby's thumb. "They went together like two pieces of a puzzle, and we went, `Aha!"' said Engebretson, who said sucking had been shown in studies to benefit babies in general and low-birth-weight babies in particular.
The nurses tested a prototype pacifier in two rounds of clinical trials involving babies who weighed from about 2 to 4 pounds. "We got some very promising results," Engebretson said. "The babies sucked well and tended to be more alert, more awake and to go into a nice sleep after having sucked a while."
Engebretson said that initially some nurses participating in the trial had been reluctant to use the pacifiers. "Because it's so long, they thought the babies might choke," she said. "But we didn't get a gag reflex from any of them, and we didn't find any babies who wouldn't take it."
Engebretson said the pacifier could be made in several sizes to accommodate different low-weight babies. "It might even be a superior design for all baby pacifiers," she said.
Engebretson, Wardell and Victoria Brownewell, a maternal-child nurse, received patent 5,275,619. It was assigned to the University of Texas Board of Regents, which hopes to license the technology. - Teresa Riordan, New York Times News Service.