Babies' sleep is one of the issues that most concern parents since the baby is born. Normally because parents create expectations about their baby's sleep ("Let's see if I'm lucky and sleep all night") unreal, since a newborn baby has to feed frequently.
In an attempt to learn about the biological rhythms of babies, the Neonatology Service of the Clinical Hospital of Granada is conducting a study on the sleep patterns of newborns and their relationship with gestational age and ambient luminosity.
Although the study has not yet been completed, some very interesting first conclusions have already been drawn. The head of the Neonatology unit explains that "In the newborn there is no melatonin rhythm, the hormone that induces and regulates sleep, and it does not adapt until four or six months after birth ".
Melatonin is a vital hormone for wake-sleep cycles, and its rhythm in babies improves thanks to external factors such as keeping the light during the day and darkness and silence during the night, that is, not lowering the day blinds, even though I am sleeping, and make the night what it is (or should be), darkness and silence. But not only do these external factors influence, but "It has been seen that the mother-child interaction is probably of greater importance to express a more mature sleep pattern", breastfeeding being key in this process.
Breast milk benefits the regulation of the baby's biological rhythms because it contains melatonin in irregular concentrations that vary depending on the time of day. In this way the baby who drinks breast milk is ingesting a different amount of melatonin according to the time of the taking, and therefore is receiving a bonus of information regarding the time of the day he is in. If we add to this fact the knowledge we already have about the composition of breast milk, which includes tryptophan, an amino acid that helps you fall asleep, we can only affirm the following: Lactation is an ally of sleep.
In short, the objective of the study is to "to know even more the time of adaptation of the newborn to the extrauterine life and the learning of the organism. To know all the patterns to deepen the disorders".
