Breast-feeding blocks pain of infant vaccination

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Turkish investigators report that breast-feeding an infant appears to significantly reduce the pain associated with vaccination.

“Even young children have a pain memory, causing them to anticipate painful procedures and react more intensely if they have undergone previous painful procedures with inadequate analgesia,” the team writes in The Journal of Pediatrics.

Dr. Dilek Dilli and colleagues at Ankara Training and Research Hospital randomly assigned 158 infants younger than 6 months of age to breast-feeding or no breast-feeding during routine immunization. They also randomly assigned another 85 children between 6 and 48 months of age to receive a 12 percent sucrose solution, topical lidocaine-prilocaine cream, or no intervention during immunization. 

All of the children were evaluated for crying time and pain by pediatricians using the Neonatal Infant Pain Scale (NIPS) for those less than 12 months of age and the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Pain Scale (CHEOPS) for those older than 12 months.

“Breast-feeding in infants under age 6 months and use of sucrose or lidocaine-prilocaine in children age 6 to 48 months significantly reduced crying time and pain scores compared with controls,” the team reports. “No difference in outcome was seen between the sucrose and lidocaine-prilocaine treatment groups.”

Dilli and colleagues comment: “Given considerations of expense and time, topical anesthetic use should be reserved for children who are phobic or particularly anxious about a pending injection. Sucrose, which is inexpensive and easily administered by individuals without professional training, may be preferred and used during immunization in young children.”

SOURCE: The Journal of Pediatrics, March 2009.

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