Study of Newborns Has Ugly Results

Looks matter, even at birth--particularly for babies born prematurely, according to nursing professors Lina Kurdahi Badr of UCLA and Bahia Abdallah of the University of Balamand in Lebanon.

Badr and Abdallah found that premature infants considered by the nursing staff to be attractive “thrive better as measured by weight gain by discharge and length of hospital stay than those who are perceived as less attractive, presumably because they receive more nurturing.” They reported their results in the publication Infant Behavior and Development.

It’s a deeply troubling finding--so troubling that many nurses don’t want to hear it, Badr said. “They want to say, ‘We don’t do that; we treat all babies the same.’ ”

But many don’t, Badr said--a point she drills into the nursing students in her child development classes.

The researchers tracked the progress of 56 babies born prematurely at two hospitals in Beirut. The infants had no congenital problems and were generally healthy. Twenty nurses rated the physical appeal of each infant on a scale ranging from 1 (“very attractive”) to 5 (“very unattractive”).

Even after Badr and Abdallah controlled for the babies’ birth weight and overall health, they found the “cutest” babies fared “significantly” better, gaining much more weight than the “least attractive” infants and spending, on average, two to three fewer days in the hospital.

Virtually from the start, Badr faced obstacles that delayed but did not derail the study. Hospitals in the United States would not permit her to conduct research in their neonatal care units. Administrators “don’t want to hear that their nurses pay less attention to some babies because of the way they look,” she said. So she decided to do the study in her native Lebanon.

The researchers got an equally chilly reception when they attempted to publish their findings in scholarly journals. “They didn’t doubt my results,” she said. “They didn’t want me to use the words ‘less-attractive’ babies” or other phrases that suggested looks mattered.

Badr said she wasn’t surprised by the results. “I have worked extensively in neonatal units” in the United States and abroad, she said. “I saw that nurses played much longer with the cuter babies, held them longer and spent longer feeding them.”

Still, her findings bothered her.

“It’s really upsetting,” Badr said. “It’s not fair. What if you have an ugly kid?”