In the first 24 hours after birth, nearly every newborn in the United States is subjected to a painful, but routine heel prick or needle stick to screen the blood for disease or rare genetic disorders.
In most cases that needle stick is administered without pain relief. But a new review of evidence suggests that breastfeeding can ease the pain of such routine newborn procedures.
"The babies who were breastfed experienced less pain, compared to not giving anything, or just swaddling them or a placebo of sterile water," said lead reviewer Prakeshkumar Shah, a neonatologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.
Shah's team gathered data from eleven studies of more than 1,000 newborns. The trials tested the effectiveness breastfeeding and breast milk compared to sugar water or pacifier - to counter the discomfort of the babies' first blood draw.
Breastfeeding works better than no intervention or placebo to extinguish the signs of pain, but breastfeeding was about as effective as highly concentrated sugar water, the review found.
It's uncertain exactly how breastfeeding dampens pain, but the reviewers suspect that a mother's comforting presence, skin-to-skin contact, diversion of attention and the sweetness of breast milk all work together to soothe infants.
The meta-analysis appears in the current issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates research in all aspects of health care. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing trials on a topic.
Whether or not a newborn is given pain relief for a one-time, routine procedure varies greatly from hospital to hospital and from one mom-and-baby unit to another, Shah said. Shah said some people don't perceive one procedure as significant enough to require pain relief.
Lawrence Gray, a University of Chicago Hospitals pediatrician, studies newborn behavior and development. He said hospitals have a lot to accomplish in the first 48 hours after birth.
"To get all those things done, a lot of things sort of happen automatically. And it's in that automaticity that babies get prodded and poked. The hospital's not a bunch of mean people. They are trying to get their stuff done, so the family can go home on time," Gray said.
The Cochrane review shows that breastfeeding is well tested as a pain-relief alternative, Gray said, and it should be offered to parents as the standard of care for newborns.
"Of course getting breastfeeding to work, as a hospital system, is much more labor-intensive than giving a baby a pacifier or swaddling the baby," he added. "You are really changing hospital culture."