A hug, a handshake, a gentle touch, a healing massage...... The beauty of touch is often overlooked.
A recent study published in Nature Human Behaviour suggests that physical contact can enhance a person's well-being and reduce pain, depression and anxiety.
This work was carried out by scholars from Germany and the Netherlands. They systematically reviewed years of research on touching, petting, hugging, and rubbing, and also combined data from 137 studies involving nearly 13,000 adults, children, and infants — each study's team of authors asked participants to be physically touched in some way or to touch objects such as stuffed animals, and compared such participants to untouched control individuals.
One of the experiments showed that older adults with dementia who received 20 minutes of gentle massage every day for six weeks were less aggressive and had lower levels of pressure markers in their blood.
Another work has shown that massage can improve mood in breast cancer patients.
The team also found that healthy young people who petted baby robotic seals were happier and less painful after being stimulated by light heat than those who read articles about astronomers.
Frédéric Michon, an expert at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and one of the authors of the new paper, points out that touch has a particularly positive effect on premature babies, with skin-to-skin contact dramatically improving their health.
Rebecca Boehme, a neuroscientist at Linköping University in Sweden, reviewed the submissions from Michon et al. and said: "There are a lot of people who have expressed the health benefits of touch as something that everyone needs, but no one has looked at the role of physical touch from such a broad perspective before." ”
Michon et al.'s analysis also reveals some interesting and mysterious patterns: in adult patients, touch improves mental health to a greater extent than in healthy adults, and for most individuals, it doesn't matter who they are contacting – a familiar relative, friend, or unfamiliar health care provider – but for newborns, the object is very important.
Ville Harjunen, a researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland, commented: "A very interesting finding that needs further support is that newborns benefit more from being touched by their parents than by strangers. He speculates that infants' preference for objects to touch may be related to differences in smell or way of holding.
Women, on the other hand, seem to benefit more from touch than men, which seems to be a cultural effect. The frequency of touch is also important – getting a massage every two years doesn't do much use.
Several of the studies reviewed by Michon et al. looked at the height of the pandemic. At that time, people were isolated and had less physical contact with others. "These efforts have found a correlation between touch deprivation and health problems such as depression and anxiety during the pandemic," Michon said. ”
Other studies have found that touching the head appears to be more beneficial than touching the torso. Michon is unable to explain this, but thinks it may be related to the distribution of more nerve endings in the head and face.
Another question is that studies in South American populations have shown more significant health benefits of touch than in North American or European populations. Michon argues that culture may have played a role in this. Bohm said that the differences between countries and regions are too small to determine the cause. "The mechanism behind this is biological, it's innate, it's the same for all people. ”
In 2023, Jeeva Sankar, a paediatric researcher at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and colleagues published a review on skin-to-skin contact care in newborns, concluding that touch therapy for preterm or low birth weight newborns should be started as soon as possible and continued for 8 hours or more, a recommendation adopted by the World Health Organization.
Skin-to-skin care, also known as kangaroo care, was coined in the 1970s by Colombian physicians Rey Sanabria and Martínez-Gómez to refer to mothers caring for their newborns in the same way that they mimic marsupials such as kangaroos:
Hold your baby upright on your chest or lie on your stomach in a horizontal position, keeping your baby in skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding exclusively if possible. Initially for preterm and low-birth weight newborns, this type of care has become widespread and is used for most newborns.
A growing body of research suggests that starting kangaroo care immediately after birth improves feeding quality and reduces the risk of neonatal infection and hypothermia. A 2021 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that starting kangaroo mother care immediately after a child's birth could save an additional 150,000 lives globally each year.
Sancar argues that the importance of physical contact has been overlooked by modern healthcare and that its scope is too broad, and that we should focus on how to integrate all forms of touch into healthcare.
Sources:
Large Scientific Review Confirms the Benefits of Physical Touch‘Kangaroo mother care’ best for early and low birth-weight babies, says WHO
END
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Is there an easy way to make your child smarter? Hug your child a lot!