Families, nurses, and physicians have appreciated that babies are different after circumcision, but there have not been controlled studies using the NBAS scale to substantiate these changes. Third, investigators of infant behavior must recognize the circumcision status of their subjects when doing research on newborn male subjects. Richards and colleagues suggest that some behavioral differences between male and female babies may be related to circumcision effects. Fourth, the infant's response to the circumcision procedure is diverse, not uniform. Our data did not support that impression.
Some infants react to the stress of circumcision by becoming more active.
This diversity of individual infants' responses to a stressful procedure like circumcision suggest that they have different coping styles from birth. The criticism may be raised that the differences observed between the early and delayed circumcision groups were real but trivial because they may have no long term significance. Unfortunately, our three week outpatient NBAS examinations did not generate reliable data. Only 50 percent of the early circumcision group returned to the hospital, and the infants were not frequently in the appropriate states to permit adequate and complete examinations. Thus, we cannot make any direct statements from our data at this point.