Obviously unnecessary in both children and adults, hiccups could play a vital role in babies' brain development in the womb.
Hiccups, what are they? A reflex, answers Peter Kahrilas, gastroenterologist at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago (United States). The doctor takes as an analogy the patellar reflex, when a doctor taps your knee lightly with a hammer. In other words, it is an involuntary reaction .
For hiccups, stimulation of the esophagus or stomach will cause the brainstem to send signals to the diaphragm and other respiratory muscles, causing them to contract involuntarily . You are then the victim of sudden air intakes . For its part, the epiglottis (behind the tongue) turns over, covering the airways and causing the characteristic "hiccup" of hiccups.
That's for mechanics. But is there a purpose to these hiccups? "For adults, it's just a nuisance , continues the researcher.They are essentially useless ". On the other hand, some researchers believe that hiccups can help the fetus learn to breathe in the womb.
A few weeks ago, a study looked at the brain activity associated with hiccups in infants. For this work, researchers monitored the brain activity of 217 newborns. In parallel, they did the same thing with 13 infants experiencing an episode of hiccups. They then discovered that these episodes stimulated three types of brain waves different in the cortex of newborns.
Previous studies have shown that involuntary muscle contractions in utero send signals to the cortex. The researchers propose that this process teaches the brain where these body parts are so that infants can control them once bigger. In view of the results of the study explained above, it is therefore possible that something similar could occur with hiccups in newborns.
"We know that involuntary muscle contraction, in animal studies, allows the brain to form a "body map" of the body, explains Lorenzo Fabrizi, of University College London, who led the study. So extrapolating this information, we could imagine that contraction of the diaphragm allows babies' brains to form a map of the respiratory system in utero so that it can be controlled at will later in life .
This theory makes sense insofar as, in utero , we receive oxygen from our mother's placenta. On the other hand, as soon as we are born, our life depends essentially on our ability to breathe on our own immediately.
If we start from this premise, it is therefore thanks to hiccups that you can breathe deeply today to calm you down or to breathe in an optimal way in full sporting effort. Everything would have been played out in the womb, while you were in full respiratory training. In the end, these repeated "hiccups" would be, in adulthood, only "leftovers" from this early training.
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