• Emma Rheel, Kelly Ickmans, Aline Wauters, Van RyckeghemDimitri M LDMLDepartment of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium.Section Experimental Health Psychology, Clinical Psychological Science, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Ma, Anneleen Malfliet, and Tine Vervoort.
• Pain in Motion research group (PAIN), Department of Physiotherapy, Human Physiology and Anatomy, Faculty of Physical Education and Physiotherapy, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.
• Eur J Pain. 2021 Nov 1; 25 (10): 2094-2111.

BackgroundPain neuroscience education (PNE) has received increasing research attention demonstrating beneficial effects on pain-related outcomes in adults. Conversely, studies on the effectiveness of PNE in children are scarce.MethodsThis study investigated the effect of a pain educational video intervention on child pain-related outcomes (i.e. experienced pain intensity, pain-related fear and catastrophic worry about pain, pain threshold and pain knowledge) in healthy children undergoing an experimental pain task. Furthermore, the moderating role of children's demographic (i.e. sex and age) and psychological (i.e. baseline pain knowledge and anticipated pain intensity, pain-related fear and catastrophic worry) characteristics was examined. Participants were 89 children (Mage  = 11.85, SD = 1.78), randomly assigned to either a condition whereby they were instructed to watch a brief pain educational video (i.e. experimental group) or to a control condition whereby they did not watch any video.ResultsStudy findings revealed that accurate pain knowledge and pain threshold were higher amongst children in the experimental group compared to the control group. In contrast with expectations, no main effects of the video intervention were observed for experienced pain intensity, pain-related fear and catastrophic worry. Moderation analyses indicated that the video intervention contributed, in comparison with the control condition, to higher levels of pain knowledge amongst younger children only and to higher pain thresholds amongst boys only.ConclusionsFurther investigation is needed to optimize pain educational video interventions and to determine whether more beneficial outcomes can be found in clinical (i.e. non-experimental) situations and in children with persistent or recurring pain problems.SignificanceExamining the impact of pain educational interventions within a non-clinical setting is deemed particularly important given that adaptive pain coping strategies likely play an important role in preventing the development and maintenance of future maladaptive pain-related behaviour. Further, study findings provide preliminary evidence of baseline and demographic (i.e. age and sex) characteristics explaining differences in the effect of a pain educational video intervention in pain knowledge and pain-related experiences during experimental pain.© 2021 European Pain Federation - EFIC®.

7 keywords...

hide…