• Dmitry Tumin, David Drees, Rebecca Miller, Sharon Wrona, Don Hayes, Joseph D Tobias, and Tarun Bhalla.
• Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, Ohio; Department of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Columbus, Ohio. Electronic address: dmitry.tumin@nationwidechildrens.org.
• J Pain. 2018 Sep 1; 19 (9): 973-982.

AbstractThe population prevalence of pediatric chronic pain is not well characterized, in part because of a lack of nationally representative data. Previous research suggests that pediatric chronic pain prolongs inpatient stay and increases costs, but the population-level association between pediatric chronic pain and health care utilization is unclear. We use the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health to describe the prevalence of pediatric chronic pain, and compare health care utilization among children ages 0 to 17 years according to the presence of chronic pain. Using a sample of 43,712 children, we estimate the population prevalence of chronic pain to be 6%. In multivariable analysis, chronic pain was not associated with increased odds of primary care or mental health care use, but was associated with greater odds of using other specialty care (odds ratio [OR] = 2.01, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.62-2.47; P < .001), complementary and alternative medicine (OR = 2.32, 95% CI = 1.79-3.03; P < .001), and emergency care (OR = 1.62, 95% CI = 1.29-2.02; P < .001). In this population-based survey, children with chronic pain were more likely to use specialty care but not mental health care. The higher likelihood of emergency care use in this group raises the question of whether better management of pediatric chronic pain could reduce emergency department use.Copyright © 2018 The American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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