Pain
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Despite its importance in clinical practice, little research has examined memory for pain in children. This prospective study tried to justify the use of children's pain recall in clinical practice. The purpose of this study was to (a) investigate the accuracy of children's recall of their worst and average pain intensity when controlling for the effects of repeated pain measurement and (b) examine the influence of children's anxiety, age, general memory ability and pain coping strategies on this accuracy. ⋯ The accuracy of children's recalled pain intensities was high and showed little decrement over 1 week. Older children had more accurate recall of their worst pain intensity. Anxiety, general memory ability and pain coping strategies were not related to accuracy of recalled pain intensities.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Enhancing sensitivity to facial expression of pain.
Clinicians have long appreciated the information communicated by a patient's facial expression. Advances in the measurement of facial movements, using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) have allowed for identification of a universal expression of pain, which is primarily encoded in four facial movements. While the FACS provides a rigorous assessment of facial expression, the time required to learn the system and to analyze the facial expression by use of slow motion video recording, makes its use impractical in the clinical setting. ⋯ Analyses indicated that the trained group was significantly more sensitive to subtle facial movements associated with low levels of pain. Relative to the patients' ratings, there was a tendency for raters to underestimate pain particularly when these were at a high level. The findings lend hope to the feasibility of developing a tool which would be clinically useful though this may be more difficult for observers judging more complex facial expressions associated with high levels of pain.