Assessment and treatment of postoperative pain in children

Abstract

Management of postoperative pain in children being under-recognized and as a result undertreated for the long period of time. Use of the precise and valid methods for the pain assessment in children is necessary for the following pain management.

Articles in English on the corresponding theme were reviewed (literature search for the period from 1978 to 2018 in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane, and Google Scholar). Data from 39 articles were used, key statements of these were synthesized and described in this article.

The latest methods of pain assessment have been described and summarized in this article depending on the age of a child and his/her status of consciousness and ventilation. Different scales utilize different information for the pain assessment, but the validity of them was shown in the studies. All these methods should be used in routine clinical practice and guide the pain management throughout the patient’s stay in the hospital.

In a large prospective study it was shown that the pain level depends not only on the volume of trauma after the operation, but also the localization and character of procedure, so even more traumatic operation can cause more pain. That shows a relevance of the pain management according to the score of different pain scales.

We also tried to utilize in tables recent data from guidelines on the pain management in children and group them according to the level of postoperative pain