ARE premature babies suffering in silence? Brain scans suggest that their faces don鈥檛 always show when they are in pain.
Nurses check whether pre-term babies in intensive care are in pain by measuring their heart rate and the sweatiness of their palms, as well as whether they grimace or not. This helps them decide when to give painkillers. Now Rebeccah Slater and colleagues at University College London have shown that babies may be in pain without any of these signs showing up.
They scanned the brains of prematurely born babies as blood was taken from their heel for routine analysis. In 30 scans, a part of the brain known to register pain in adults was activated. Yet in 10 of these procedures, the babies did not grimace or show outward signs of pain (PLoS Medicine, ). 鈥淭he measurements don鈥檛 necessarily correlate with what is happening in the brain,鈥� Slater says.
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