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Don’t worry about giving your baby a spoonful of sugar.
A new study from the University of Auckland in New Zealand has found that giving babies little amounts of sugar will limit the risk of them having brain damage, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Many babies are born with low sugar levels, which can eventually lead to brain damage. But by giving them some sugar, or foods that will increase their blood sugar levels, it limits the risk, NIH reported.
“If the baby has regular blood monitoring, to monitor their blood sugar levels and are treated to keep their levels above the safety threshold … then those babies seem to be protected from any potential (brain) damage due to the low sugars, so that's a very reassuring message for families,” according to Radio New Zealand News.
The study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that 30 percent of newborns are at risk for hypoglycemia and have a lack of sugar in their blood, Radio New Zealand News reported.
The study said 15 percent of babies suffer from low blood glucose levels every year.
"Hypoglycemia is the single most preventable cause of brain damage in newborns," professor Jane Harding told the Australian Associated Press. "We know that a baby with a blood glucose level that is too low for too long will suffer neurological damage, but there has been debate about just how low, for how long, and in which babies. This is the first clear evidence that treating babies to keep their blood sugar above a widely used safety intervention threshold does indeed protect them."
This isn’t the first time research has said sugar can help newborns. Back in 2013, researchers, including Harding, found that putting sugar gel inside the cheek of a baby is one method of limiting possible brain damage, according to BBC. The sugar spiked low blood sugar levels for these newborns, freeing them from brain damage risk.
The study, which tested this gel therapy on more than 240 babies, found that using gel to lightly spike a newborn’s low sugar level was also cost-effective.
"This is a cost-effective treatment and could reduce admissions to intensive care services, which are already working at high-capacity levels,” Andy Cole, then-chief executive of baby charity Bliss, told BBC. “While the early results of this research show benefits to babies born with low blood sugars, it is clear there is more research to be done to implement this treatment."
But sugar doesn’t heal everything, nor should it be given to babies all the time. As The Guardian reported in 2010, parents often debate whether to give babies sugar water as pain relief. But a study published in The Lancet that year found that sugar doesn’t help relieve pain, The Guardian reported.
Medical officials will sometimes use sugar as pain relief for newborns during surgeries, The Guardian reported. But the study found babies will still feel pain, especially through heel pricks.
"This is an important study,” Neon Modi, a professor at Imperial College London, told The Guardian. “Sucrose is given because it seems to work. If it's confirmed that sucrose doesn't work, we have a problem because we don't have any effective treatments for acutely painful procedures in newborns."
But while sugar may not relieve pain for pricks on the feet, research has found sugar can provide easy pain relief for vaccinations, according to WebMD. In fact, a 2010 study published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood found that children as old as 1 were less likely to feel pain when they had sugar before immunization shots, WebMD reported.
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