Abstract

Background: Premature very low birthweight (VLBW) infants are born with an underdeveloped parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) which may limit their ability to respond adequately to feeding and may limit their capacities for extrauterine growth and development.

Objectives: To describe the patterns of autonomic response to feeding and identify relationships between change in heart period variability measures over time with selected infant characteristics.

Methods: Individual growth curve analysis techniques were used to describe the patterns of change over time in sympathetic and parasympathetic tone as measured by low and high frequency heart period power.

Results: Sixteen mechanically ventilated VLBW infants with a mean corrected gestational age of 30.4 weeks participated in the study. The low frequency (LF) power slope was −17.67 (p = 0.0002) and the high frequency (HF) power slope was −0.92 (0.0003). There was a significant relationship between HF slope and birth gestational age (r = −0.49, p = 0.05).

Conclusions: HF power, representing primarily parasympathetic activity, did not increase with enteral feeding as anticipated. LF power, an indicator of sympathetic tone, decreased during and after feeding suggesting the anticipated effect of inhibition of the sympathetic nervous system in response to the gut stimulus. Critically ill VLBW infants possess an overriding sympathetic response, but may not have adequate PNS tone development.