Pain in Rett syndrome: two pilot studies on the assessment of pain and the construction of a suitable measuring scale

Abstract

Background: Rett Syndrome (RTT) is a severe, neurodevelopmental disorder mainly caused by mutations in the MECP2 gene, affecting around 1 in 10,000 female births. Severe physical, language, and social impairments impose a wide range of limitations in the quality of life of the patients with RTT. Comorbidities of patients with RTT are varied and cause a lot of pain, but communicating this suffering is difficult for these patients due to their problems, such as apraxia that does not allow them to express pain in a timely manner, and their difficulties with language that also do not permit them to communicate. Two pilot studies investigate the manifestation of pain of patients with RTT and propose a suitable scale to measure it. Aims of this study: the first aim was to describe pain situations of RTT by collecting information by parents; the second aim was to test and compare existing questionnaires for non-communicating disorders on pain such as PAINAD, CPOT, and NCCPC-R to assess which of them is best related to the pain behavior of patients with RTT. The third aim was to identify the specific verbal and non-verbal behaviors that characterize pain in girls with Rett syndrome, discriminating them from non-pain behaviors. Method: eighteen girls with RTT and one girl with RTT with 27 manifestations of pain were video-recorded both in pain and base-line conditions. Two independent observers codified the 90 video-recording (36 and 54) to enhance their behavioral characteristics.Results: The two studies showed that the most significant pain behaviors expressed by girls with respect to the baseline condition, at the facial level were a wrinkled forehead, wide eyes, grinding, banging teeth, complaining, making sounds, crying and screaming, and the most common manifestations of the body were tremors, forward and backward movement of the torso, tension in the upper limbs, increased movement of the lower limbs and a sprawling movement affecting the whole body. Conclusion: The results of the two studies helped to create an easy-to-apply scale that healthcare professionals can use to assess pain in patients with Rett's syndrome. This scale used PAINAD as its basic structure, with some changes in the items related to the behavior of patients with RTT.

Telerehabilitation with Computer Vision-Assisted Markerless Measures: A Pilot Study with Rett Syndrome Patients

“…Syndrome severity was assessed for each patient using the neuropsychiatric reference. Levels of severity ranged from 5 to 20, where level 5 refers to mild severity, while level 20 refers to severe severity, according to the standardization of the subscale "clinical severity" of the RARS [56]. Table 1 shows the attributes of the groups.…”