Rebeccah Slater and colleagues studied the effect of sucrose i n treating neonatal pain, and they conclude that "oral sucrose does not significantly affect activity in neonatal brain or spinal cord nociceptive circuits, and therefore might not be an effective analgesic drug". The neurophysio-logical data considered by Slater and colleagues as the primary outcome measure do not really provide a physiologically sensible bridge to their conclusions.Slater and colleagues call their electroencephalography (EEG) response a "specific nociceptive brain activity", because they earlier showed it to come after heel lance but not after a tactile touch. It is obvious that a heel lance also results in arousal, causing a comparable scalp response, which can even be seen after an auditory stimulus.Hence, the EEG response seen by Slater and colleagues is not proven to be specific to the noxiousness of the stimulus.
展开▼
