Discovering research on preemies

Earlier this year, I was working on my memoir, which includes a lot of material about my premature birth at 28 weeks. In the memoir, I mused about how as a child I often felt “numb” emotionally. I said I believed  that as a preemie I was “barraged by a thousand unpleasant sensations when I was too young to process any of them. Something in my brain turned those pain receptors way down low. I went numb. The problem with going numb is you can’t turn yourself back on very easily, and when you do it hurts. A lot.”

I had this idea just from observing myself and how I felt. But when I was taking an online writing class from Joan Dempsey on revision and quoted this passage, she commented “I wonder if psychologists have done research on this.” I said, “Not to my knowledge. But I’ll check.”

When I did check, I was shocked to find that there is a lot of research on preemies and how they have done later in life. And while they can’t do double blind studies, the longitudinal studies have often suggested that preemies do have trouble expressing their emotions and have trouble connecting with their peers.  (Quoted in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/apr/10/5) These studies have found other characteristics of preemies as well. Cortisol levels, a sign of stress, were abnormally low for the levels of physical stress such as pain from needle sticks in early infancy but abnormally high later in life, according to one study. ( Brummelte, Susanne et al. “Cortisol Levels in Former Preterm Children at School Age Are Predicted by Neonatal Procedural Pain-Related Stress.” Psychoneuroendocrinology 0 (2015): 151–163. PMC. Web. 31 July 2018)

I’ll be discussing more research as we go. There is a lot! I do want to say research also suggests preemies are resilient so these difficulties should not be too discouraging. They are just facts we should take into account as we deal with ourselves or the preemies in our lives.