BMJ 1995;311:747 (16 September)

Letters

Analgesic effect of sucrose

Heel pricks were unnecessarily painful

EDITOR,--Nora Haouari and colleagues have clearly shown that oral sucrose reduces crying and tachycardia in term infants undergoing a standard painful procedure, blood sampling by heel prick, with a manual lance.1 The fact that the effect is dose dependent suggests that oral sucrose has analgesic properties. The key messages point out that every newborn baby in Britain is subjected to painful procedures and that little is done to minimise the discomfort which these cause.

One way to minimise the discomfort is by changing the method of heel blood sampling. Automated, springloaded lances (for example, Autolet Lite Clinisafe, Owen Mumford, Oxford) cause less pain without a reduction in efficacy, and they are less operator dependent.2 3 The manual lance has no place on the postnatal ward or neonatal unit.

Clinical research fellow Professor of paediatric medicine Department of Child Health, Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham NG7 2UH

David Barker, Nicholas Rutter. . . [Full text of this article]


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Relevant Article

The analgesic effect of sucrose in full term infants: a randomised controlled trial
Nora Haouari, Christopher Wood, Gillian Griffiths, and Malcolm Levene
BMJ 1995 310: 1498-1500. [Abstract] [Full Text]

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