Circumcised boys remember pain of surgery, study says

Circumcision makes baby boys far more sensitive to pain than girls and their non-circumcised counterparts, a Hospital for Sick Children study suggests.

And circumcised males may continue to be less tolerant of injuries and painful ailments in youth and adulthood, said Dr. Gideon Koren, whose study was published in this week's issue of the British medical journal The Lancet.

Videotaping 100 boys and girls as they got their diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and flu vaccinations at the age of 3 to 4 months, researchers at the hospital studied the infants for their responses to the jabbing needles.

We discovered that the pain was higher among the boys with circumcisions whereas (with) the boys that did not have circumcision, the pain was not different from the girls.

About 50 per cent of the babies were boys, and half of these were circumcised—about the rate in the Canadian population.

Doctors measured the babies' pain responses by the length and loudness of their cries and by the amount they writhed and wriggled in their discomfort.

The increased response to the vaccination pain among the circumcised boys was likely due to a remembrance of their earlier penis surgery, Koren said.

It tells us that boys who are circumcised remember that pain and it probably conditions them to respond more for later pain, said Koren, who is head of clinical pharmacology at the Toronto pediatric hospital.

The study helps shatter the belief of some that newborns don't experience pain, he said, and argues forcefully that baby boys should be given pain relief during circumcision.

We do know from adults that we are conditioned for pain, and the infant's pain conditioning may well linger into later life, he said.

We did not check for this but I would not be surprised. If this is something that the newborn baby is remembering and it's already causing him to be conditioned, then it may have long-term effects.

Koren said there seemed to be no other explanation than circumcision for the different reactions from the infants. We also looked at cultural background and maternal intervention on pain response. No significant associations were found.

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