USD Magazine, Fall 1995

who received a grant from the American Cancer Society to fund her research. "People started using the idea by coating pacifiers with table sugar, a similar concept but not exactly the same. But nobody researched whether this relieved the pain or simply masked pain behaviors such as crying." Greenberg intends to find out whether sucrose really is the solution. Studies on rats have shown that sucrose may be processed through the same pathways in the body that morphine uses. If that's the case, then the sucrose solution may be effective in relieving pain in infants, without the need for drugs or a doctor's prescription. "I think that the medical profession needs to know whether this process is effective in alleviating pain," Greenberg says. "In today's cost-cutting, busy health care environment, you have to look at your actions and decide if they're beneficial." The mechanism for Greenberg's study is simple. In the United States, every infant is tested shortly after birth for metabolic diseases. The process involves drawing blood from the heel of the newborn, in much the same way a doctor pricks the finger of an adult to draw blood. Greenberg will measure pain responses in infants by observing the duration of crying, measuring a stress hormone found in saliva and monitoring a complex heart rate pattern. By comparing groups of infants using different forms of sucrose, those sucking on a pacifier alone, and those with no intervention, she hopes to bear out the assumption that this simple process can do much to alleviate pain in newborns. Although it sounds simple, Greenberg has gone through a complicated series of reviews to gain approval and funding for her research. The toughest part, convincing parents to let their infants take part in the study, is yet to come. Although the risks are minimal, Greenberg notes that the consent forms required may scare off prospective participants. Her convictions about the importance of the project, however, seem ready to carry her through. "Sometimes the tendency is to go ahead without much scientific study," she says. "I want to answer the question, is this real– ly helping?"

how our solar system might have formed - specifically, what might have led to the spacing between the planets. "It was a very simple idea," Sheehan recalls, "but hammering out the details was tough." The two physicists applied a fluid model to come up with a prediction of planetary spacing. That led to publication of an article about the system in the journal Geophysical and Astro– physical Fluid Dynamics. Although the analysis was limited to the ideal properties involved in the fluid system, the implica– tions are far-reaching. "We're hoping that others may build on our work and develop a full-scale computer model that might be able to make predic– tions about how planets form as well as the rotation of the planets," Estberg says. "The computer model would allow us to plug in a variety of scenarios and see if they work." In the meantime, Estberg and Sheehan hope to pursue the funds to build a rotating platform and test their theory. "There's a physical model of the atmosphere called the dishpan model, which essentially came about when a physicist at the University of Chicago put a dishpan on a platform and rotated it," Estberg says. "I tried it but used a salad bowl with' a sloping bottom instead, which produced zonal jets. "I guess we might call our model the salad bowl model," Estberg smiles. "But it's going to have to be a very special salad bowl." A Sugar-Coated Solution Cindy Smith Greenberg is much like her peers in the medical profession in that one of her goals is to make people feel better. Greenberg is taking that mission one step further, however, setting out to tackle the complex question of how to offer newborns and infants relief from pain. Surprisingly, it's a question that until recently wasn't even asked. "It's only in the past 20 years or so that the medical com– munity has acknowledged that infants feel pain; before that they were considered too neurologically immature," says Greenberg, who is working toward a doctorate in nursing sci– ence at USD's Philip Y. Hahn School of Nursing. "Now it's acknowledged that infants can feel pain and remember it, and that it may have far-reaching effects on how people process pain later in life." Greenberg notes that while this acknowledgment was a major step, there hasn't been much formal research into how to deal with the pain that infants feel. Part of the problem is the reluc– tance to use medicines or narcotics because of potential side effects. But Greenberg believes that there are effective alterna– tives to drugs, and her study, to be undertaken over the next year, aims to prove that belief. The answer may be as simple as sugar. "The idea for my study came from an article that talked about using a sucrose solution that seemed to be effective in alleviating pain," says Greenberg,

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