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It appears that sugar really may help the medicine go down - studies suggest a
few drops can comfort babies who are having their jabs.
The Cochrane team reviewed 14 studies involving more than 1,500 infants going
for routine childhood immunisations or a heel-prick blood test.
Babies given a sugary solution to suck as they were about to be injected cried
far less than those given water.
While sugar may pacify, it is unclear if it also relieves pain.
Experts say more research is needed to explore this.
Start Quote
If you do the usual holding and comforting, I'm not sure how much sucrose would
add
Dr David Elliman Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
A small study published a couple of years ago in The Lancet medical journal
looked at the responses of 44 infants given either sugar or water as they had a
heel-prick blood test.
The sugar did not appear to make a difference to pain - all babies similarly
grimaced and had comparable electrical activity measured with EEG readings in
areas of the brain that process pain.
The lead researcher in the Cochrane review, Dr Manal Kassab of the Jordan
University of Science and Technology in Irib, Jordan, said: "Giving babies
something sweet to taste before injections may stop them from crying for as
long.
"Although we can't confidently say that sugary solutions reduce needle pain,
these results do look promising."
Dr David Elliman of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said
sugar solution was not used routinely in practice.
"Generally, doctors recommend that the mother holds the baby and comforts it
while they have their immunisation. If she is breastfeeding still, she might
want to breastfeed her baby at the same time.
"With older children we try to distract them. If you do the usual holding and
comforting, I'm not sure how much sucrose would add.
"What we do know is that using a shorter needle tends to be more painful, even
though this might seem counterintuitive. That's because the injections need to
go into the muscle."
By the time a child has reached its second birthday it should have had around
10 different injections to protect against various infectious diseases,
including measles, mumps and rubella.