ELBW clinical trials

Sucrose to Reduce Pain During Initiation of Venipuncture in Extremely Low Birth Weight Babies

Newborn infants in the neonatal intensive care nursery experience multiple, painful tissue damaging procedures daily. Preterm especially extremely low birth weights and critically ill newborns admitted to a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) undergo repeated skin-breaking procedures that are necessary for their survival. Sucrose is the accepted clinical standard nonpharmacological intervention for managing acute procedural pain for these infants. However its role in extremely low birth weight infants still need to be addressed. The exact dose and concentration of oral sucrose is still not clear. When a Medline search was carried out to evaluate the role of two different concentrations (12% vs 24%) of oral sucrose in reducing pain in extremely low birth weight babies, very limited data was available. Cochrane Systemic Review also indicated that specific attention to the efficacy and safety of sucrose administration in extremely low birth weight preterm infants needs to be further investigated. More so, no work on this aspect was identified from the Indian subcontinent. Hence, the current study was planned with an aim to study the effects of 12% and 24% oral sucrose in extremely low birth weight infants during initiation of venipuncture and also study the side effects if any associated with these concentrations. This is a preliminary work on this topic, the results would therefore need to be interpreted with caution. However, the findings and the study design of this work will provide suitable platform for future well powered studies on this population.