The development of human cortical networks: effects of early life stress and injury

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Many infants are born too young or too small or with serious medical conditions. As a result, these infants will need to spend time in hospital and undergo numerous clinical procedures, many of which are painful. While even the youngest preterm infant can show behavioural reactions to pain, we do not know how much the pain is processed in their brain. This is important because the brain is responsible for the actual feeling of pain: how much it hurts, where it is and how unpleasant it is. Our research aims to discover this so that infant pain can be prevented or adequately treated. Too much injury and stress in early life, when the brain is still forming connections, is thought to alter normal development of pain pathways in the brain, but this process is poorly understood. We intend to clarify this by measuring brain activity, tissue injury and physiological stress independently and analysing how they influence each other in intensive care. Finally, since each infant is an individual, we need to know how pain pathways in the brain differ between infants and what factors are responsible for these differences. Our work will help ensure that each hospitalised infant receives appropriate pain relief.