COMPARING THE EFFICACY OF ORAL GLUCOSE 50%, ACETAMINOPHEN AND BREAST-FEEDING ON REDUCING NEONATAL PAIN

irritant stimuli cause a pain response in neonates and neglecting this pain may
cause severe long term adverse effects for the neonates. Several pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic
methods have been suggested for reducing neonatal pain but few comprehensive
studies have compared these methods. This study compares the efficacy of three different methods for
reducing neonatal pain and tries to determine the best one.
Materials & Methods: In this study, 128 healthy term neonates were randomly divided into four equal
groups. Before any painful procedure and as an analgesic method, we used 1 ml of oral 50% glucose
in the first group, breast-feeding in the second, oral acetaminophen (15mg/kg/dose) in the third, and 1
ml of sterile water in the fourth (control) group. In order to measure the pain, we used standard
COVERS scale.
Results: The mean (±SD) of pain score in each of the three groups receiving oral glucose
(4.9688±1.2044), breast-feeding (6.2188±1.3850), and acetaminophen (7.4688±1.4364) has a
statistically significant difference with the control group (P=0.00, 0.00, and 0.02, respectively). Also, ,
the case groups were considerably different in the significant level of 0.05 with each other.
Conclusion: Each of these three studied methods has significant analgesic effect on reducing neonatal
pain from which oral glucose 50% was the most effective one and breast-feeding and acetaminophen
were in next levels of efficacy, respectively.