Overview

• The study, published in Pain in June 2025 and led by Professor Lorenzo Fabrizi at UCL, analyzed MRI scans from the Developing Human Connectome Project and the Human Connectome Project to map pain networks in 372 infants.
• Researchers found the sensory-discriminative network reaches adult-level connectivity between 34 and 36 weeks after conception, enabling infants to detect and localize pain.
• The affective-motivational subnetwork matures around 36 to 38 weeks post-conception, underpinning newborns’ emotional responses to discomfort.
• Investigators observed that the cognitive-evaluative network remains underdeveloped beyond 42 weeks after conception, indicating full-term babies still lack circuits for interpreting pain.
• Findings underscore the heightened vulnerability of preterm infants to painful procedures and support calls for personalized analgesia and optimized timing of interventions in neonatal units.