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COPYRIGHT 2005 International Medical News Group
WASHINGTON -- Not only do infants feel pain and remember painful experiences, but this pain may be magnified in the very young, said Robert M. Kennedy, M.D., at the first annual Advanced Pediatric Emergency Medicine Assembly.
"When I first started training 20 years ago, our 'improvement" was to decrease the number of people needed to hold down a child for a procedure by incorporating the use of Velcro," said Dr. Kennedy, of the pediatric emergency medicine department at St. Louis Children's Hospital. "However, we know now that it is likely that an infant given the same stimulus as an older child actually perceives much more intense pain than that older child.
"We know now that by 24-26 weeks' gestation, about midway through the third trimester, nociceptic fibers from the ventroposterior thalamus have fully penetrated the primary somatosensory cortex. There's no question that when our babies are born, they certainly can perceive pain. It just astounds me that an infant's ability to...
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