Applied nursing research : ANR
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Comparative Study
Pain measurement during labor: comparing the visual analog scale with dermatome assessment.
The purpose of this article is to examine the agreement between two measures of pain in laboring women who receive epidural analgesia for relief to support validity and reliability of the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) in this population. ⋯ There was moderate, significant correlation between the two measures. However, agreement between the two measures did not meet preset standards with Bland-Altman analysis, suggesting that one measure cannot be substituted for the other. Overall, the average dermatome levels alone underestimated pain in laboring women as recorded by the VAS, although both under-and overestimation of pain relief occurred during the series of observations.