NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Mary Poppins had it right: a spoonful of sugar does help the medicine go down. According to research presented at the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting in Barcelona this week, adults are better able to tolerate pain if they have a bit of sweetness on their tongue.

"Sweet-tasting solutions seem to be analgesic (pain-reducing) in adults," lead author Maxim D. Lewkowski, who is pursuing his doctorate in psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, told Reuters Health.

Previous research has found that providing infants with a taste of sugar before a needle stick helps them to cry less, possibly by making it easier for them to tolerate pain. But little research has been done on whether this effect lasts into adulthood.

To investigate, Lewkowski and colleagues asked 72 young adults to taste either a sweet solution, a bitter solution, or water, and see how long they could tolerate having their hand plunged into icy water.

Study participants given the sweet solution endured the icy plunge longer, for an average of about 85 seconds, versus roughly 82 seconds for those given the bitter taste and about 83 seconds for those given water. The researchers theorize that sweetness on the tongue somehow facilitates the function of the body's natural painkillers, also called opioids or endorphins.

The effect was more dramatic in patients with lower-than-average blood pressure, the investigators found. The sweetness increased pain tolerance by about 18% in the half of patients with the lowest blood pressures, while it had no effect on the patients with higher blood pressure.

The findings suggest that people with high blood pressure--or even just a tendency toward higher blood pressure--may not be buffered from pain by the sweet taste because they have a reduced response to natural painkillers, Lewkowski said.

"Consistent with the notion that people with high blood pressure have different functioning of (natural painkillers), individuals with higher blood pressure are less sensitive to this effect," Lewkowski noted.

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