Science Reveals Gramma Wisdom: Lullabies Sooth Baby's Pain
Science Reveals Gramma Wisdom: Lullabies Sooth Baby's Pain
Twenty Minutes of Cooing Protects Babies from (heel prick) Pain
Researchers played lullabies to babies before pricking their heels. They also pricked baby heels without a lead-up lullaby session. The lullabied babies registered less pain than the control group.
The heel pricking is part of a standard newborn blood test. Babies are usually given a sugar solution for ‘pain relief.’ (We can talk about this separately, but it doesn’t seem like a good precedent to set for a newborn brain - sugar buzz as pain relief.)
In this study of 100 babies, half got the heel prick followed by the sugar buzz. The other half were cuddled with lullabies for 20 minutes before and 5 minutes after the heel prick. The lullabied babies were observed to display fewer and weaker expressions of pain immediately after the prick and after two minutes. The sugar buzz babies took 3 minutes to calm down.
“Until fairly recently, the medical community did not believe newborns experienced pain. But over the last several decades, studies have revealed that infants do perceive pain, and they may be more sensitive to painful stimuli than adults are. Enduring repeated pain-inducing procedures without pain-relief treatment can have lasting neurological consequences for infants, including a heightened perception of pain...
More research is needed to better understand neonatal pain and determine the most effective ways to relieve it, including the optimal combination of methods, Anbalagan says. But “proven and safe therapies are currently underused for routine minor, yet pain procedures,” according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Along with investigating the effectiveness of music as a pain-relief method, Anbalagan and his colleagues sought to bring awareness to newborn pain with their study.
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““Music intervention is an easy, reproducible and inexpensive tool for pain relief from minor procedures in healthy, term newborns,” said Anbalagan. “We suggest that future studies should also strongly consider exploring the effects of similar interventions, such as recorded parental voice instead of Mozart music.”
Previous research has suggested that premature babies may feel less pain during medical procedures when they are spoken to by their mothers, and that hearing their mother’s voice boosted levels of oxytocin in their saliva. Oxytocin is a hormone known to be involved in attachment processes, and may also help to protect against the effects of pain.
“Involving parents as partners in neonatal care is an underutilised approach,” Anbalagan said.”
Grammas, Nanas, Mimis, Aunties, Mommies, and cousins of every kind - your mission now definitely includes lullaby pain meds. Though the research is incomplete, cooing may also work for those who don’t sing.