On the relation of injury to pain-an infant perspective

Abstract

Forty-five years ago, Patrick Wall published his John J Bonica lecture "On the relation of injury to pain."90 In this lecture, he argued that pain is better classified as an awareness of a need-state than as a sensation. This need state, he argued, serves more to promote healing than to avoid injury. Here I reframe Wall's prescient proposal to pain in early life and propose a set of different need states that are triggered when injury occurs in infancy. This paper, and my own accompanying Bonica lecture, is dedicated to his memory and to his unique contribution to the neuroscience of pain. The IASP definition of pain includes a key statement, "through their life experiences, individuals learn the concept of pain."69 But the relation between injury and pain is not fixed from birth. In early life, the links between nociception (the sense) and pain (the need state) are very different from those of adults, although no less important. I propose that injury evokes three pain need states in infancy, all of which depend on the state of maturity of the central nervous system: (1) the need to attract maternal help; (2) the need to learn the concept of pain; and (3) the need to maintain healthy activity dependent brain development.