Prior leg massage decreases pain responses to heel stick in preterm babies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: Leg massage could inhibit the transmission of pain by 'closing the gate' or by activating the endogenous opioid pathway to decrease nociceptive transmission of pain associated with heel stick. The aim of this study is to determine the effects of massage therapy prior to heel stick on responses assessed by the Neonatal Infant Pain Scale (NIPS) (primary outcome), heart rate, respiratory rate and oxygen saturation (secondary outcomes) in infants who required a heel stick for blood sampling. METHODS: This randomised, double-blind, crossover trial with infants from 1 to 7 days post birth excluded those with prior surgery, septicaemia, current assisted ventilation or an analgesic within 48 h. After informed consent, 13 infants received a 2-min massage of the ipsilateral leg prior to heel stick on the first study sampling and no massage on the next sampling 2-7 days later and 10 infants had the reverse order. The bedside nurse, blinded to the intervention, measured NIPS, heart rate, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation prior to massage, after massage, and 5 min after heel stick. Serum cortisol was measured with the blood sampling. RESULTS: In 23 infants (birthweight 795-2507 g), there were no adverse physiologic effects of massage. After heel stick, NIPS (P < 0.001) and heart rate (P = 0.03) were increased in the no-massage group compared with the massage group. Respiratory rate, oxygen saturation and serum cortisol were not significantly different. CONCLUSION: Gentle massage of the leg prior to heel stick is safe and decreases pain responses in preterm infants.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".