Effect of Body Position on Physiological Alteration While Feeding Infants: A Systematic Review

An infant should be able to coordinate sucking, swallowing, and breathing to have a safe and effective feeding, which is developed with the increasing gestational age. Any problem in each of these functions can lead to the risk of aspiration, pneumonia, decreased oxygenation saturation, apnea, and bradycardia. The changed body positions may cause changes in the physiological efficiencies of the preterm infants. The objective of this review is to determine the impact of body position on the physiological alternations in the preterm infants while bottle feeding.
In order to review the previous studies, we referred the related resources from existing databases such as Scopus, Ovid, Science Direct, ProQuest, Pub Med, Wiley Cochrane Library, Magiran, Medlib, SID, and Google Scholar. Both English (from 1997 to 2016) and Persian studies (from 2010 to 2016) were reviewed.
Four clinical trials with eligible criteria were used as a crossover while the infants were bottle fed. The body positions that are considered in this study include elevated side-lying position vs. semi-upright position, upright position vs. cradle position, side-lying position vs. cradle position, and semi-elevated supine position vs. semi-elevated side-lying position to determine the effect of the physiological parameters while bottle feeding the premature infants.
It seems that there is still not enough evidence to determine the positions affecting the physiological parameters of an infant while bottle feeding. Thus, it seems necessary to have further studies to analyze the impact of proper body position on the infant’s physiological alternations.