The number of painful procedures that neonates are exposed to is correlated with their future brain maturation, pain-related behaviour, stress reactivity and cognitive development 25– 30. During their hospital stay, the severity of illness influences neonatal pain-related behaviour 21: a diagnosis of jaundice can result in delayed cortical somatosensory processing 22, and infections can lead to an increase in pain sensitivity 23, 24. Both the level of stress 8 and the sex of the infant 20 have recently been shown to be factors determining pain-related activity in the brain. Many factors affect an individual’s sensitivity to a noxious stimulus, even at the beginning of life. In particular, the discovery and analysis of nociceptive event related potentials (nERPs) have provided new insights into neonatal brain processing of acute noxious events 7, 9, 15– 19. However, significant advancement in the understanding of processing of pain in the infant nervous system has come from several imaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) 7– 9, near infra-red spectroscopy (NIRS) 10– 12, and functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) 13, 14. In the absence of self-report, infant pain is commonly assessed using various behavioural and physiological measures 5, 6. While in the NICU or other postnatal wards, neonates can undergo up to 12-14 tissue breaking procedures a day 2, 3, many with little or no analgesic therapy 4. Worldwide 5–18% of babies are born before term age 1 (37 weeks) and many remain in hospital for some time following birth (mean neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) stay, 9.1 days 2). Furthermore, it provides information on the formation of individual pain phenotypes. This dataset can be used to investigate the cortical, physiological, and behavioural pain-related processing in human infants and to evaluate the impact of medical conditions and experiences upon the infant response to noxious stimuli. The infants’ relevant medical and pain history was collected up to the day of the study and recorded in an extensive database of variables including clinical condition at birth, diagnoses, medications, previous painful procedures, injuries, and selected maternal information.

The dataset includes responses to non-noxious sham and auditory controls. This data is linked to pain-related behaviour (facial expression), physiology (heart rate, oxygenation) and a composite clinical score (Premature Infant Pain Profile, PIPP). Cortical activity was recorded from 112 neonates (29–47 weeks gestational age at study) using a 20-channel electroencephalogram (EEG), which was time-locked to a heel lance. We present a dataset of cortical, behavioural, and physiological responses following a single, clinically required noxious stimulus in a neonatal sample.

Eeg procedure