Reducing parental trauma and stress in neonatal intensive care: systematic review and meta-analysis of hospital interventions
Open accessAbstract
Objective To classify NICU interventions for parental distress and quantify their effectiveness.Study design We systematically reviewed controlled studies published before 2017 measuring NICU parental distress, defined broad intervention categories, and used random-effects meta-analysis to quantify treatment effectiveness.Results Among 1643 unique records, 58 eligible trials predominantly studied mothers of preterm infants. Interventions tested in 22 randomized trials decreased parental distress (p < 0.001) and demonstrated improvement beyond 6 months (p < 0.005). In subgroup analyses, complementary/alternative medicine and family-centered instruction interventions each decreased distress symptoms (p < 0.01), with fathers and mothers improving to similar extents. Most psychotherapy studies decreased distress individually but did not qualify for meta-analysis as a group.Conclusion NICU interventions modestly reduced parental distress. We identified family-centered instruction as a target for implementation and complementary/alternative medicine as a target for further study. Investigators must develop psychosocial interventions that serve NICU parents at large, including fathers and parents of full-term infants.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Three systematic reviews support the efficacy of some psychosocial interventions for NICU parents, including family-centred care, cognitive behavioural therapy, and psychoeducational interventions.
“Three systematic reviews [7 -9] support the efficacy of some of these interventions, including family-centred care models that focus on increasing a parent's involve ment in their baby's medical care, psychotherapy-based interventions, particularly cognitive behavioural therapy, and psychoeducational in terventions.”
From A digital Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and education intervention targeting stress of parents and caregivers with preterm babies in the neonatal intensive care unit: A randomised controlled cluster trial protocol (2024) · cites this paper as [9]
The Discussion (page unavailable) reports that family-centered instruction reduces parental distress and that four of five psychotherapy studies reported reductions, including studies of trauma-focused CBT. It also says interventions that changed NICU medical care had an overall null effect; the Results classify direct parental involvement in an infant’s medical care in that group. Thus, the review does not support efficacy for the specific family-centred model described in the citing sentence. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 42 · Cited by 133
- Authors
- Sabnis, A., Fojo, S., Nayak, S. S., Lopez, E., Tarn, D. M., & Zeltzer, L.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Los Angeles (US)
- University of Southern California (US)
- Northeastern University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Sabnis, Animesh
- Venue
- Journal of Perinatology
- Published
- 2019-01-18
- Volume
- 39
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 375-386
- ISSN
- 0743-8346 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-5543
- PMC
- PMC7067599
- OpenAlex
- W2910054807
- Cited by
- 133
- References
- 42
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 30 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 5
- FWCI
- 2.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Journal of Perinatology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (UL1TR000124, UL1TR001881)
- National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health › Infant Development and Preterm Care
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Maternal Mental Health During Pregnancy and Postpartum
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Family and Disability Support Research
- Keywords
- parental distress, neonatal intensive care, preterm infants, complementary and alternative medicine, psychotherapy, fathers, mothers, psychosocial interventions, parental stress
- MeSH terms
- Female, Humans, Infant, Newborn, Infant, Premature, Intensive Care Units, Neonatal, Male, Parents, Psychotherapy, Stress, Psychological, Intensive Care, Neonatal, Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
