Der Schmerz
-
The intensity of pain cannot be measured directly but can only be described subjectively. This obviously complicates the assessment especially in the younger age group. Pain evaluation and documentation are essential for good results in pain therapy. ⋯ In neonates and children up to 4 years of age, standardized scales have been developed for observation of their activities. Children in the age group 4-6 years old are able to communicate about pain. At this age self-report scales can be used to assess pain sensations."Quality Improvement in Postoperative Pain Management in Infants" (QUIPSInfant) represents a new tool for pediatric outcome evaluation, consisting of standardized data acquisition of outcome and process quality indicators.
-
Previous studies suggested that areas of the neural"pain matrix" are activated by the processing of pain-related environmental cues such as pain-related pictures or descriptors of pain. However, it is still sketchy whether these activations are specific to the pain-relevant content of the stimuli or simply reflect a general effect of negative emotional valence or increased arousal. The present study addressed this question by investigating the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of pain-related, negative (non-pain-related), positive and neutral words. ⋯ When attention was focused on a distracting task (distraction task), we found a decrease in activation within the dorsal anterior cingulum (dACC) and a relative increase in activation within the subgenual anterior cingulum (sACC) when processing pain-related words compared to other words. These results indicate that the differences in processing pain-related words compared to non-pain-related words are specific to the content of the words and cannot simply be explained by emotional valence or arousal. Additionally, we showed that the specific activations to pain-related words are substantially modulated by the attention demands of the task.