Articles: pain-measurement.
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J Dev Behav Pediatr · Jun 1990
The consistency of young children's assessment of remembered painful events.
Clinicians need to know the consistency of a child's report of his pain in order to assess the intensity of that pain. To explore an age cutoff above which children are consistent in reporting their pain, we tested the consistency of children's reports of recalled pain, using a variety of scales. ⋯ However, no age group tested was consistent more than 80% of the time on all measures. We conclude that children are able to report remembered pain intensity consistently with increasing age but that we cannot establish a firm cutoff between the ages of three and eight years with our data.
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As more dentists diagnose and treat the patient with temporomandibular disorders, muscle palpation has been recognized as a valuable diagnostic method. But this method was depended on sensibility and experience of the operator. The purpose of this study was to establish the quantification of muscle palpation by new pressure pain threshold apparatus. ⋯ The females showed lower PPT than the males. 2. No difference of PPT between right and left sides was recognized in normal subject, but the significant difference in the patient. 3. PPT of the normal subjects were significantly higher in the posterior temporal M. than the other sites and lower in the superficial portion of masseter M. than the other sites.
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Altogether 553 children (195 first graders, mean age 6.8 years, and 358 third graders, mean age 8.7 years) participated in the development of a self-report measure to assess the intensity of children's pain. The first step was the derivation, from children's drawings of facial expressions of pain, of 5 sets of 7 schematic faces depicting changes in severity of expressed pain from no pain to the most pain possible. With the set of faces that achieved the highest agreement in pain ordering, additional studies were conducted to determine whether the set had the properties of a scale. ⋯ The final study checked, with 6-year-old children, the test-retest reliability of ratings for recalled experiences of pain. Overall, the faces pain scale incorporates conventions used by children, has achieved strong agreement in the rank ordering of pain, has indications that the intervals are close to equal, and is treated by children as a scale. The test-retest data suggest that it may prove to be a reliable index over time of self-reported pain.