Topical amethocaine gel for pain relief of heel prick blood sampling: a randomised double blind controlled trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Heel prick blood sampling is a commonly performed and painful procedure in the newborn infant. Use of a topical local anaesthetic does not relieve this pain. A 4% w/w amethocaine gel (Ametop) reduces the pain of venepuncture in the newborn but has not been tried with heel pricks. AIM: To investigate the effect of topical amethocaine gel on the pain of heel prick in the newborn infant. DESIGN: Randomised, double blind, placebo controlled trial. SUBJECTS: Sixty newborn infants, gestation 28-42 weeks (median 36), postnatal age 1-16 days (median 5) undergoing routine heel prick blood sampling. METHODS: A 1.5 g portion of 4% w/w amethocaine gel or placebo was applied to the skin under occlusion for one hour, then wiped away. Heel prick blood sampling with a spring loaded lance was performed five minutes later. The procedure was videotaped and pain assessed at one second intervals using an adaptation of the neonatal facial coding system (NFCS). No or minimal pain was defined as a cumulative score of less than 5 (out of 15) in the three seconds after firing of the lance and as lack of a cry in the first five seconds. RESULTS: In terms of a low NFCS core and lack of cry (p = 0.12) 20 of 30 (67%) in the amethocaine group and 13 of 29 (45%) in the placebo group had no or minimal pain in response to the heel prick. The median cumulative NFCS score over the three seconds after firing the lance was 3 (interquartile range 0-6) in the amethocaine group compared with 5 (interquartile range 1-10) in the placebo group (p = 0.07). These differences are not significant. CONCLUSIONS: Topical amethocaine gel does not have a clinically important effect on the pain of heel prick blood sampling and its use for this purpose cannot therefore be recommended. Alternative approaches to the relief of pain from this procedure should be explored.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".