Background & Aims: irritant stimuli cause a pain response in neonates and neglecting this pain may cause severe long term adverse effects for the neonates. Several pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic methods have been suggested for reducing neonatal pain but few comprehensive studies have compared these methods. This study compares the efficacy of three different methods for reducing neonatal pain and tries to determine the best one.

Materials & Methods: In this study, 128 healthy term neonates were randomly divided into four equal groups. Before any painful procedure and as an analgesic method, we used 1 ml of oral 50% glucose in the first group, breast-feeding in the second, oral acetaminophen (15mg/kg/dose) in the third, and 1 ml of sterile water in the fourth (control) group. In order to measure the pain, we used standard COVERS scale.

Results: The mean (±SD) of pain score in each of the three groups receiving oral glucose (4.9688±1.2044), breast-feeding (6.2188±1.3850), and acetaminophen (7.4688±1.4364) has a statistically significant difference with the control group (P=0.00, 0.00, and 0.02, respectively). Also, , the case groups were considerably different in the significant level of 0.05 with each other.

Conclusion: Each of these three studied methods has significant analgesic effect on reducing neonatal pain from which oral glucose 50% was the most effective one and breast-feeding and acetaminophen were in next levels of efficacy, respectively.

SOURCE: URMIA MED J 2014: 25(7): 585 ISSN: 1027-3727