Babies’ capacity for pain may form around time of birth

WORLD SCIENCE

A new study sug­gests in­fants may de­vel­op the abil­ity to sense pain a few weeks be­fore their nor­mal due dates.

“Ba­bies can dis­tin­guish pain­ful stim­u­li as dif­fer­ent from gen­er­al tou­ch from around 35 to 37 weeks gesta­t­ion—just be­fore an in­fant would nor­mally be born,” said Lo­ren­zo Fab­rizi of Uni­vers­ity Col­lege Lon­don. Re­port­ing their find­ings on­line Sept. 8 in the re­search jour­nal Cur­rent Bi­ol­o­gy, Fab­rizi and col­leagues say the re­sults may have im­plica­t­ions for clin­i­cal care. They might al­so be cited in de­bates over wheth­er abor­tion should be le­gal.

The researchers meas­ured preterm in­fants’ re­sponses to a pain stim­u­lus that they said was med­ic­ally un­avoid­a­ble for them—a prick of the heel to get a blood sam­ple. Since ba­bies can’t tell you wheth­er some­thing hurts, the re­search­ers used record­ings of elec­tri­cal brain ac­ti­vity, a tech­nique called elec­tro­en­ceph­a­lo­graphy.

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