Needle Anxiety in Children With Type 1 Diabetes and Their Mothers

Abstract

Nurses should incorporate assessment and intervention for needle anxiety in children and parents at diagnosis of diabetes through informal interview or formal survey. Nurses can effectively incorporate coping strategies into their teaching of parents and children to administer injections and fingersticks.

Anxiety in Children and Adolescents With Type 1 Diabetes

“…In addition, repeated exposure to injections may have lead to a natural decrease in needle anxiety. Taken together, these results demonstrate that needle anxiety is an under-assessed and under-recognized phenomenon in pediatric T1D [35].…”

“…Using the Perceptions of Insulin Shots and Fingersticks Survey, Howe and colleagues [35] found that 41 % of children with newly diagnosed T1D reported fear associated with insulin injections and 32 % reported fear associated with fingersticks with younger children reporting more fear than older children. Forty-four percent of mothers endorsed fear associated with administering insulin injections and 22 % with fingersticks.…”

The Role of Comfort and Discomfort in Insulin Therapy

“…65 Similar impact of HCP apprehension on patient discomfort or distress is seen when family members are the HCPs or healthcare supporters. Although parents are generally considered more accurate predictors of their children's pain, 66 among mothers of newly diagnosed children with diabetes, 16 30.4% rated their child's injection pain as moderate-severe, versus the reports of only 22.7% of children. Of experienced mothers, 13.6% continued to report distress with injections versus 9.5% of their children.…”

“…9 In insulin-refusers, anxiety, or unbased fear, may be even more common, reported by 61% of poorly controlled patients in an Israeli managed care setting, 13 29.5% of American patients ''unwilling'' to initiate insulin, 14 and 48% of the TRIAD cohort of insulin-refusers. 15 In newly diagnosed pediatric patients, 16 although 40% overall reported moderate-severe levels of fear, prevalence of fear reached 75% in children < 9 years of age.…”

Fear of hypoglycemia and its clinical significance: a case-control study

“…От-носительно реже отмечаются фобии, связанные с проко-лом кожи: фобии самоконтроля гликемии -в 0,2-1,3%, фобии инъекций -0,6-0,8% взрослых больных СД 1 типа (СД1) [7]. Эти разновидности фобий более зна-чимы в детской диабетологии -на них указывают более 13% матерей маленьких детей, страдающих СД [8]. Фобия инъекций также ведет к пропуску инъекций инсу-лина [6,9,10].…”