Nutritive sucking research: from clinical questions to research answers.

Nutritive sucking and feeding behaviors have the potential to predict developmental outcomes. Research is beginning to connect nutritive sucking behaviors and neurodevelopmental outcomes, providing an important understanding of how infants develop during the first year of life. A program of research has evolved using sucking behaviors as the primary indices of both maturation and development in preterm infants. Clinical questions were the guiding force behind 5 funded grants from the National Institutes of Health and many small grants from foundations and professional organizations. Three of the National Institutes of Health studies were research based and 2 were for development of the feeding instrumentation. These cumulative grants have generated a significant volume of data; highlights and clinical implications of this work are presented in this article.