Premature infants display discriminable behavioral, physiological, and brain responses to noxious and nonnoxious stimuli.

ABSTRACT: Pain assessment in preterm infants is challenging as behavioral, autonomic, and neurophysiological measures of pain are reported to be less sensitive and specific than in term infants. Understanding the pattern of preterm infants' noxious-evoked responses is vital to improve pain assessment in this group. This study investigated the discriminability and development of multimodal noxious-evoked responses in infants aged 28-40 weeks postmenstrual age. A classifier was trained to discriminate responses to a noxious heel lance from a nonnoxious control in 47 infants, using measures of facial expression, brain activity, heart rate, and limb withdrawal, and tested in two independent cohorts with a total of 97 infants. The model discriminates responses to the noxious from the nonnoxious procedure

SUBMITTER: van der Vaart M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9433423 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature