Mary Poppins was right: A spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down, according to the results of a new study.
Dr Denise Harrison, of the Royal Childrens Hospital in Melbourne, and colleagues found that giving less than half a teaspoon of a sugary solution to infants up to 12 months of age reduces crying and pain due to vaccination.
The large-scale statistical study, which appears online ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, combined immunisation data from 1618 infants.
Harrison says giving sugar solutions by mouth to newborns before painful procedures is known to be effective at reducing pain, but until now there was no evidence to support the practice in older babies.
“We located a potential 700 published trials for inclusion in our study, but found only 14 randomly administered a sugary solution or water or no treatment to infants older than a month”, says Harrison.
The sweeter the better
Where possible, the team analysed the incidence of crying, the length of time the children cried and their pain scores, which can include assessments of facial expression, arm and leg movements, breathing and heart rate, in addition to crying.
The amount of sugar made a difference, but because there was a wide variety of volumes and concentrations used in the separate trials, the researchers can’t say what the ideal dose is.
“We were, however, able to combine and analyse three trials where the infants all received a 30% glucose solution and found that, compared with those given water, they were 20% less likely to cry,” says Harrison. “This is much sweeter than flat lemonade.”
“Interestingly, breast milk is not very sweet by comparison, and expressed milk seems to be no more effective than water. But when babies are breast fed, the combination of milk and the sucking is a very effective technique”.
