Melodic Medicine: Music’s Potential to Soothe Infant Discomfort During Medical Procedures
Research indicates that playing soothing music for infants, such as a Mozart lullaby, may help reduce their discomfort during excruciating procedures.
Commonly performed medical procedures on newborn infants include injections and heel-prick blood tests. While some have argued that babies’ minds are not fully developed enough for them to sense pain, recent research indicates that they experience it similarly to adults.
Dr. Saminathan Anbalagan, a neonatal and perinatal medicine fellow at Thomas Jefferson University hospital in Philadelphia, US, who led the new study, said, “Studies have [also] demonstrated that early pain experiences may alter pain responses later in life and lead to other long-term adverse outcomes. Hence establishing an easy and reliable method to reduce pain in newborns is crucial.”
Anbalagan and his colleagues measured the pain levels of one hundred newborn neonates undergoing a heel-prick blood test as part of routine screening for uncommon but life-threatening conditions such as cystic fibrosis and inherited metabolic disorders. All neonates were given a modest dose of sugar solution two minutes prior to the procedure, and for 54 of them, an instrumental Mozart lullaby was played for 20 minutes before, during, and five minutes after the procedure. The other infants listened to no music.
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Evaluating Infant Pain Levels: The Impact of Lullabies and Noise-Cancelling Headphones
A researcher utilizing noise-cancelling headphones evaluated the pain levels of the infants using a standard scoring system that evaluated facial expressions, weeping, respiration patterns, limb movements, and alertness, with a maximum score of seven.
While pain scores were zero for both groups before the heel prick, the average pain score of neonates who listened to the lullaby was considerably lower during and immediately after the procedure compared to those who did not listen to music.
The pain scores of neonates who listened to the lullaby during the procedure were four, but dropped to zero after one minute. The average pain scores of neonates who did not hear the lullaby were seven at the time of the heel puncture, 5.5 after one minute, and 2 after two minutes.
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Source: The Guardian
