INFANT PAIN: PROCESSING, PERCEPTION AND PREVENTION Prof. Maria Fitzgerald, London, United Kingdom    - Biography English - 2007-10-08
Speaker Disclosure Grant received from the MCR of Great Britain and Wellcome Trust

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Background and aims: The study of pain processing in preterm infants is both clinically important and intellectually challenging.

On a practical level, developing improved methods of infant pain measurement is essential if analgesic studies and trials on infants in intensive care and post-surgical infants are to be useful. Current methods rely on physiological and behavioural indices, such as facial expression or heart rate, that do not take sufficient account of the immaturity of the sensory, motor and autonomic pathways which will determine the time course, intensity and focus of pain.

Methods: In this lecture I will show how our neurobiological approach to investigating the developmental processes underlying pain processing has improved our understanding of infant pain. Results: Our results have cast light upon the developmental mechanisms of immediate procedural pain, persistent pain and the longer term consequences of tissue and nerve injury in early life.

On a more fundamental level, our results raise questions relating to pain processing in infancy go to the very heart of our understanding of the developing human brain and force us to ask basic questions about the beginnings of sensory awareness and perception.

Acknowledgements: Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust, British Pain Society, UCLH Trustees.