Pain in children and adolescents: a common experience

Abstract

Little is known about the epidemiology of pain in children. We studied the prevalence of pain in Dutch children aged from 0 to 18 years in the open population, and the relationship with age, gender and pain parameters. A random sample of 1300 children aged 0-3 years was taken from the register of population in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. In the Rotterdam area, 27 primary schools and 14 secondary schools were selected to obtain a representative sample of 5336 children aged 4-18 years. Depending on the age of the child, a questionnaire was either mailed to the parents (0-3 years) or distributed at school (4-18 years). Of 6636 children surveyed, 5424 (82%) responded; response rates ranged from 64 to 92%, depending on the subject age and who completed the questionnaire. Of the respondents, 54% had experienced pain within the previous 3 months. Overall, a quarter of the respondents reported chronic pain (recurrent or continuous pain for more than 3 months). The prevalence of chronic pain increased with age, and was significantly higher for girls (P<0.001). In girls, a marked increase occurred in reporting chronic pain between 12 and 14 years of age. The most common types of pain in children were limb pain, headache and abdominal pain. Half of the respondents who had experienced pain reported to have multiple pain, and one-third of the chronic pain sufferers experienced frequent and intense pain. These multiple pains and severe pains were more often reported by girls (P<0.001). The intensity of pain was higher in the case of chronic pain (P<0. 001) and multiple pains (P<0.001), and for chronic pain the intensity was higher for girls (P<0.001). These findings indicate that chronic pain is a common complaint in childhood and adolescence. In particular, the high prevalence of severe chronic pain and multiple pain in girls aged 12 years and over calls for follow-up investigations documenting the various bio-psycho-social factors related to this pain.

Parental Responses to Pain in High Catastrophizing Children: The Moderating Effect of Child Attachment

“…Of these children, 22.7% reported having experienced pain 'only once', 40.2% 'sometimes', 9.6% 'often' and 2.5% reported experiencing 'constant' pain. These findings are also in line with ones obtained previously 42 and further indicate that pain is a common experience and complaint in childhood and adolescence.…”

Lower Extremity Pain Is Associated With Reduced Function and Psychosocial Health in Obese Children

“…Accordingly, the 51 individuals with LE pain were categorized in the LE+ group and the 124 individuals without LE pain were categorized in the LEÀ group (Table 3). Potentially confounding variables that may influence LE pain group categorization such as age, sex, and Tanner stage were compared between the LE+ and LEÀ groups [25,36,44]. We compared age between the LE+ and LEÀ groups using independent samples t-tests and found the mean age for both groups as approximately 13 years old (Table 3) (t = 0.037, p = 0.970).…”

Impact of parental catastrophizing and contextual threat on parents’ emotional and behavioral responses to their child’s pain

“…Pain is a common complaint in children [66] and parental factors are known to play a central role in the child's pain experience [13,42]. Specifically, parental responses may have adaptive as well as maladaptive influences upon their child's pain [13,16,48,63,79,80,81].…”