Pharmacological and Combined Interventions to Reduce Vaccine Injection Pain in Children and Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: This systematic review assessed the effectiveness and safety of pharmacotherapy and combined interventions for reducing vaccine injection pain in individuals across the lifespan. DESIGN/METHODS: Electronic databases were searched for relevant randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials. Self-reported pain and fear as well as observer-rated distress were critically important outcomes. Data were combined using standardized mean difference (SMD) or relative risk with 95% confidence intervals (CI). RESULTS: Fifty-five studies that examined breastfeeding (which combines sweet-tasting solution, holding, and sucking), topical anesthetics, sweet-tasting solutions (sucrose, glucose), vapocoolants, oral analgesics, and combination of 2 versus 1 intervention were included. The following results report findings of analyses of critical outcomes with the largest number of participants. Compared with control, acute distress was lower for infants breastfed: (1) during vaccination (n=792): SMD -1.78 (CI, -2.35, -1.22) and (2) before vaccination (n=100): SMD -1.43 (CI, -2.14, -0.72). Compared with control/placebo, topical anesthetics showed benefit on acute distress in children (n=1424): SMD -0.91 (CI, -1.36, -0.47) and self-reported pain in adults (n=60): SMD -0.85 (CI, -1.38, -0.32). Acute and recovery distress was lower for children who received sucrose (n=2071): SMD -0.76 (CI, -1.19, -0.34) or glucose (n=818): SMD -0.69 (CI, -1.03, -0.35) compared with placebo/no treatment. Vapocoolants reduced acute pain in adults [(n=185), SMD -0.78 (CI, -1.08, -0.48)] but not children. Evidence from other needle procedures showed no benefit of acetaminophen or ibuprofen. The administration of topical anesthetics before and breastfeeding during vaccine injections showed mixed results when compared with topical anesthetics alone. There were no additive benefits of combining glucose and non-nutritive sucking (pacifier) compared with glucose or non-nutritive sucking (pacifier) alone or breastfeeding and sucrose compared with breastfeeding or sucrose alone. CONCLUSIONS: Breastfeeding, topical anesthetics, sweet-tasting solutions, and combination of topical anesthetics and breastfeeding demonstrated evidence of benefit for reducing vaccine injection pain in infants and children. In adults, limited data demonstrate some benefit of topical anesthetics and vapocoolants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".