Babies Feel Pain 'Like Adults'

Whether babies feel pain, has been the subject of debate and we ourselves have posted this question on Mamalette.

Just like adults and older children, babies can feel pain and new research suggests that babies can feel pain just like you and I.

Until as recently as the 1980s, researchers assumed newborns did not have fully developed pain receptors, and believed that any responses babies had to pokes or pricks were merely muscular reactions. But new research published Tuesday morning changes that.

Scientists at Oxford University say a world-first form of research shows infants may even be far more sensitive to pain than adults.

In the first of its kind study using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), scientists found that 18 of the 20 brain regions active in adults experiencing pain were also active in babies.

 

Taking advantage of the fact that newborns less than a week old tend to sleep through anything, Rebeccah Slater, an associate professor of pediatric neuroimaging at Oxford, and her colleagues placed 10 infants who were 1-6 days old in an fMRI machine.

The researchers, who reported their findings in eLife, observed which areas of the infants’ brains became more active, or consumed more oxygen, as the scientists lightly poked their feet. They did the same for adults and compared the brain images.

In adult brains, 20 regions were activated by the painful stimulus, and the newborns shared 18 of these.

“Obviously babies can’t tell us about their experience of pain and it is difficult to infer pain from visual observations,” says Slater.

 

“In fact some people have argued that babies’ brains are not developed enough for them to really feel pain ... [yet] our study provides the first really strong evidence this is not the case.”

 

“The infant’s brain is much more developed than I was expecting,” says Slater.

 

“I might have thought that some information might have gone to the sensory areas of the brain — telling the babysomething was happening on the foot, for example — but I didn’t necessarily think it would go to areas more commonly involved in emotional processing such as the anterior cingular cortex, which is thought be involved in the unpleasantness associated with an experience.”

Even at birth, then, a baby’s brain possesses the foundation for quickly evaluating anything he or she experiences, including painful stimuli.

“I hope this provides incentive to more researchers to find better ways of measuring pain in babies, and prioritize the importance of providing the best pain relief possible in children,” says Slater.