Does Being Born Early Change How You Feel Pain Later in Life?

What a 2026 review of studies in preterm-born children, teenagers, and young adults found — and what it means for families

Babies born too early often spend their first weeks in intensive care, where they experience many small painful procedures at a time when their nervous system is still developing. A 2026 research review gathered eight studies that tested how people born preterm feel pain years later — as children, teenagers, and young adults — and compared them with people born at full term. It found two gentle but real signals: those born preterm tended to rate pain as somewhat more intense, and needed a slightly hotter touch before heat felt painful. For most other measures there was no clear difference, and the researchers are careful to say the evidence is still weak and preliminary.

Why This Question Matters

For any parent whose baby has spent time in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), the sight of repeated heel pricks, blood draws, and cannula placements is hard to forget. A natural worry follows: could all of that early discomfort affect the child in the long run? This is not only an emotional question but a scientific one, and researchers have taken it seriously for decades [1]. Modern neonatal care already works hard to keep babies comfortable, yet even today infants born very early undergo a substantial number of painful procedures during their stay [2]. Understanding whether those early experiences leave a lasting trace helps everyone — families and clinicians alike — appreciate why preventing unnecessary pain in the NICU is worth the effort.

How Doctors Used to Think About Baby Pain

It is worth knowing how much thinking has changed. Only a few decades ago, many doctors believed that newborns — especially those born early — could not really feel pain the way older children do, partly because their nervous systems were seen as too immature. As a result, some procedures were once done with very little pain relief. That belief has been thoroughly overturned. Careful research showed that babies do feel pain, that their bodies respond to it, and that repeated early pain may influence how the developing brain grows and wires itself [3][4]. Today's NICUs treat pain as a genuine problem and use comfort measures and, when needed, medicines to manage it. What has been missing is a clear answer to the longer question: does early pain change how a person senses pain many years afterward? The 2026 review was designed to pull together whatever evidence exists on exactly that [5].

What the Researchers Did

The team searched the world's medical literature and found eight suitable studies. In total, these involved 731 people — 328 born preterm and 403 born at term — from Norway, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Israel [5]. The participants ranged widely in age, from about 7 years old up to 28, which is helpful because it lets researchers see whether any differences last from childhood into adulthood [6][7]. To measure pain sensitivity fairly, the studies used a laboratory method called quantitative sensory testing, in which trained researchers apply carefully controlled warmth, cold, or pressure and ask the person to say when they first feel it and when it starts to hurt. Combining the results of many small studies into one bigger analysis, as this review did, gives a clearer overall picture than any single study alone.

What They Found

Two findings stood out. First, people born preterm tended to report pain as more intense than those born at term — a moderate difference that was fairly consistent across studies [5]. Second, and this may sound surprising, people born preterm generally needed a hotter stimulus before heat became painful — in other words, they were a little less sensitive to brief heat [5]. For the other things measured — sensitivity to cold pain, to pressure, and the basic ability to detect warm and cool temperatures — there was no meaningful difference between the two groups [5].

At first glance, "feels pain more intensely" and "less sensitive to heat" seem to contradict each other. But they measure two different things. One test asks at what point a careful heat touch first turns painful; the other asks how strong the pain feels once it is already there, which is shaped by emotions and past experience as much as by the nerves themselves [5]. Earlier studies in school-age children had already noticed this same combination [8][6]. Interestingly, the plain ability to detect temperature was normal in preterm-born people — it was specifically the pain side of sensation that seemed a little different, which hints that early experiences may fine-tune how the brain handles pain rather than damaging the sensing nerves [5].

It helps to picture what these laboratory tests actually involve. A researcher might slowly warm a small metal plate resting on the skin and ask the person to press a button the instant the warmth turns to a faint sting; that button-press marks the "heat pain threshold." Another test gently increases pressure until it first feels sore. Because the equipment, the body area tested, and the age of the volunteers differed from study to study, the results did not always line up neatly — a reminder that these are careful but imperfect snapshots rather than a single tidy measurement [5]. The studies also included people with very different early histories, from those born moderately early to those born extremely early who needed surgery as newborns, and that mix makes it harder to say what caused any difference [6][8].

What This Means for Families and Their Baby's Care

The most important and reassuring takeaway is that this research supports something NICUs already do: work hard to prevent and treat pain. If early pain can subtly influence how the pain system develops, then every effort to reduce unnecessary painful procedures and to comfort babies is worthwhile — not just for the moment, but possibly for the years ahead [9]. Families can take genuine comfort in the comfort measures themselves. Skin-to-skin "kangaroo" care, gentle swaddling and tucking, letting a baby suck on a pacifier, and small amounts of sweet solution during procedures are all proven ways to ease a baby's pain, and parents are central partners in providing them [10].

For older children, teenagers, and adults who were born preterm, the practical message is simply awareness. A person born very early might experience or report pain a little differently from others, and that is worth mentioning to doctors and nurses so that their pain is understood and taken at face value rather than measured against a standard expectation [5]. None of this suggests that being born preterm dooms someone to a life of pain problems — the differences found were modest, and many preterm-born people feel pain no differently at all.

An Honest Word About How Strong This Evidence Is

The researchers themselves are refreshingly candid about the limits of what they found. The eight studies were small, used different methods, and were mostly built from looking back at old records rather than following people forward carefully. When the team formally graded the quality of the evidence, they rated it as "very low" for every result [5]. That does not mean the findings are wrong — it means they are best treated as early clues that need confirming, not as final answers. The honest summary is that being born preterm may be linked to small, lasting differences in how pain is felt, but better studies are needed to be sure.

There is another reason to read these results gently. Pain is never purely a matter of nerves and signals; it is shaped by memory, mood, attention, and the meaning a person attaches to it. A young adult who spent their first months in intensive care may, understandably, relate to pain differently for reasons that have as much to do with their life story as with any rewiring of sensory pathways. The researchers could not separate these threads, and they did not claim to. What they offer is a careful first map of a landscape that has barely been charted — enough to point future studies in the right direction, but not enough to draw firm conclusions about any one child [5]. For a parent, this means the review is best understood as encouragement to keep asking good questions, not as a verdict about how their own child will experience pain as they grow.

What Researchers Are Working On Next

Scientists want to replace these scattered clues with stronger evidence. The next step is to follow groups of preterm-born children forward over many years, using the same standardized pain tests at each stage and keeping careful track of exactly what each baby experienced in the NICU, so they can separate the effects of pain itself from all the other challenges of being born early [11][12]. In the meantime, the practical wisdom is already clear and hopeful: protecting babies from unnecessary pain, and comforting them when pain is unavoidable, is good care today and may be a gift that lasts well beyond the NICU.

References

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