The utility of PAINAD in assessing pain in a UK population with severe dementia

Abstract

PAINAD is a sensitive tool for detecting pain in people with advanced dementia, but has a high false positive rate, frequently detecting psychosocial distress rather than pain. PAINAD can be used to assess whether pain management strategies have been successful.

A Comparative Investigation of Observational Pain Assessment Tools for Older Adults With Dementia

“…18 Given that there are only 5 items in this scale, the level of internal consistency reported is sometimes less than optimal 12 , which is not surprising given that the internal consistency of the scale is affected by the number of items in the scale (i.e., higher numbers of items are associated with higher internal consistency values 44 ). Nonetheless, the tool has been shown to be sensitive in pain detection 48 and has gained popularity within clinical settings partly due to its brevity. 12,49,50 Non-communicative Patients' Pain Assessment Instrument (NOPPAIN): The NOPPAIN 26 includes 4 main sections.…”

Can an observational pain assessment tool improve time to analgesia for cognitively impaired older persons? A cluster randomised controlled trial

“…This is widely used in the preverbal paediatric ED population. For people with dementia, one such scale is the PAINAD score 17. When using PAINAD, an observer assigns a score of 0–2 across five domains to rate the patient’s pain intensity on a scale of 0–10 (figure 1).…”

“…Prior to the trial, an education programme was delivered across all sites and included dementia pain signs and symptoms, screening for cognitive impairment using the SIS and study protocol and data collection sheet 17. At intervention sites PAINAD education was added.…”

Assessing pain in dementia: tools or tacit knowledge (or both)?

“…7 They also show that distress might have a number of causes, one of which is pain. So pain needs to be considered, but a high score on an observational pain tool is not diagnostic of pain.…”