Analgesia for infants’ circumcision

Carlo V Bellieni, Maria G Alagna, Giuseppe Buonocore

Male circumcision (MC) is one of the oldest and most common operations performed all over the world. It can be performed at different ages, using different surgical techniques, for different religious, cultural and medical reasons.Our aim is to examine and compare the various methods of analgesia and different surgical procedures reported in literature that are applied in infant MC. We performed a PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE and Cochrane search in the papers published since 2000: 14 studies met the inclusion criteria, most of them showing that a combined pharmacological and non-pharmacological intervention is the best analgesic option, in particular when the dorsal penile nerve block is combined with other treatments. The Mogen surgical procedure seems to be the less painful surgical intervention, when compared with Gomco clamp or PlastiBell device. Only 3 papers studied groups of at least 20 babies each with the use of validated pain scales. Data show a dramatic decrease of pain with dorsal penile nerve block, plus acetaminophen associated to oral sucrose or topic analgesic cream. However, no procedure has been found to definetively eliminate pain; the gold standard procedure to make MC totally painfree has not yet been established.