Observational studyArchives of disease in childhood. Fetal and neonatal edition2017
Cry presence and amplitude do not reflect cortical processing of painful stimuli in newborns with distinct responses to touch or cold.
Observational study in Archives of disease in childhood. Fetal and neonatal edition, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT04050384 (Effect of a Vibratory Stimulus on the Mitigation of Nociception-specific Behavioral and Electroencephalographic Responses to Skin Puncture in Neonates), which is not on this map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Effect of a Vibratory Stimulus on the Mitigation of Nociception-specific Behavioral and Electroencephalographic Responses to Skin Puncture in Neonates: a Randomized Control Trial
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Crying out in pain-A systematic review into the validity of vocalization as an indicator for pain.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2020Pooled it
- Electroencephalography during acute painful procedures in neonates: a scoping review.Pain reports · 2026Review
- Continuous wireless sensor monitoring with applied diagnostics: Clinical Sensor Pain Scale and Automated Sensor Pain Scale in the NICU.BMJ health & care informatics · 2025Article
- Establishing a standardised approach for the measurement of neonatal noxious-evoked brain activity in response to an acute somatic nociceptive heel lance stimulus.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2024Article
- Development of the neonatal pain response variable set: a mixed methods consensus process.European journal of pediatrics · 2024Article
- The Irritable Infant in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Risk Factors and Biomarkers of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease.The Journal of pediatrics · 2024Article
- On being earnest: a mentor and her mentee's perspective.Pediatric research · 2023Article
- The effects of different procedures on pain levels in preterm and term infants in neonatal intensive care unit: a cross-sectional survey of pain assessment in newborns.Irish journal of medical science · 2023Article
- Using CCA-Fused Cepstral Features in a Deep Learning-Based Cry Diagnostic System for Detecting an Ensemble of Pathologies in Newborns.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Vocal pain expression augmentation for a robopatient.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2023Article
- How can cry acoustics associate newborns' distress levels with neurophysiological and behavioral signals?Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Can Event-Related Potentials Evoked by Heel Lance Assess Pain Processing in Neonates? A Systematic Review.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Nociception and the neonatal brain.Seminars in fetal & neonatal medicine · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveNewborns requiring hospitalisation frequently undergo painful procedures. Prevention of pain in infants is of prime concern because of adverse associations with physiological and neurological development. However, pain mitigation is currently guided by behavioural observation assessments that have not been validated against direct evidence of pain processing in the brain. The aim of this study was to determine whether cry presence or amplitude is a valid indicator of pain processing in newborns.
designProspective observational cohort.
settingNewborn nursery. PATIENTS: Healthy infants born at >37 weeks and <42 weeks gestation.
interventionsWe prospectively studied newborn cortical responses to light touch, cold and heel stick, and the amplitude of associated infant vocalisations using our previously published paradigms of time-locked electroencephalogram (EEG) with simultaneous audio recordings.
resultsLatencies of cortical peak responses to each of the three stimuli type were significantly different from each other. Of 54 infants, 13 (24%), 19 (35%) and 35 (65%) had cries in response to light touch, cold and heel stick, respectively. Cry in response to non-painful stimuli did not predict cry in response to heel stick. All infants with EEG data had measurable pain responses to heel stick, whether they cried or not. There was no association between presence or amplitude of cries and cortical nociceptive amplitudes.
conclusionsIn newborns with distinct brain responses to light touch, cold and pain, cry presence or amplitude characteristics do not provide adequate behavioural markers of pain signalling in the brain. New bedside assessments of newborn pain may need to be developed using brain-based methodologies as benchmarks in order to provide optimal pain mitigation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.