Sweet relief or lasting impacts? Review of neonatal pain and sucrose in developing rodents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the neonatal intensive care unit, preterm infants can experience 7 to 17 painful and stressful procedures daily. Oral sucrose is the standard treatment for procedural pain, but their combined short-term and long-term cumulative effects on brain development remain unclear. Growing concerns about the potential neurodevelopmental consequences of repeated sucrose and pain exposure underscore the need for mechanistic research to understand their interaction during critical periods of brain development. Translational animal models, particularly in rodents, are instrumental in advancing neonatal pain research. Their comparable neurodevelopmental trajectory to human infants and the ability to systematically control pain and sucrose exposures make them valuable tools for investigating both immediate and enduring effects. These models have been refined to replicate clinically relevant procedural pain in the neonatal intensive care unit and have yielded mixed findings. Some studies report that sucrose reduces short-term pain sensitivity and improves early spatial learning, whereas others show impaired short-term memory and long-term reductions in regional brain and white matter volumes. This review synthesizes current literature on translational rodent models of early-life pain and sucrose exposure, highlighting both potential benefits and adverse outcomes. These findings underscore the complexity of using sucrose as an analgesic and the importance of ongoing preclinical research to inform evidence-based neonatal pain management. By critically evaluating the dual impact of pain and sucrose, this work contributes to a deeper understanding of how early interventions shape neurodevelopment and supports the development of safer, more effective strategies for managing pain in this vulnerable population.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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".