↓ Skip to main content

Psychological therapies for the management of chronic and recurrent pain in children and adolescents

Overview of attention for article published in Cochrane database of systematic reviews, October 2018
Altmetric Badge

About this Attention Score

  • In the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (96th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (87th percentile)

Mentioned by

news
1 news outlet
blogs
1 blog
policy
3 policy sources
twitter
71 X users
wikipedia
8 Wikipedia pages

Readers on

mendeley
715 Mendeley
You are seeing a free-to-access but limited selection of the activity Altmetric has collected about this research output. Click here to find out more.
Title
Psychological therapies for the management of chronic and recurrent pain in children and adolescents
Published in
Cochrane database of systematic reviews, October 2018
DOI 10.1002/14651858.cd003968.pub5
Pubmed ID
Authors

Emma Fisher, Emily Law, Joanne Dudeney, Tonya M Palermo, Gavin Stewart, Christopher Eccleston

Abstract

This is an update of the original Cochrane review first published in Issue 1, 2003, and previously updated in 2009, 2012 and 2014. Chronic pain, defined as pain that recurs or persists for more than three months, is common in childhood. Chronic pain can affect nearly every aspect of daily life and is associated with disability, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. The aim of this review was to update the published evidence on the efficacy of psychological treatments for chronic and recurrent pain in children and adolescents.The primary objective of this updated review was to determine any effect of psychological therapy on the clinical outcomes of pain intensity and disability for chronic and recurrent pain in children and adolescents compared with active treatment, waiting-list, or treatment-as-usual care.The secondary objective was to examine the impact of psychological therapies on children's depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms, and determine adverse events. Searches were undertaken of CENTRAL, MEDLINE, MEDLINE in Process, Embase, and PsycINFO databases. We searched for further RCTs in the references of all identified studies, meta-analyses, and reviews, and trial registry databases. The most recent search was conducted in May 2018. RCTs with at least 10 participants in each arm post-treatment comparing psychological therapies with active treatment, treatment-as-usual, or waiting-list control for children or adolescents with recurrent or chronic pain were eligible for inclusion. We excluded trials conducted remotely via the Internet. We analysed included studies and we assessed quality of outcomes. We combined all treatments into one class named 'psychological treatments'. We separated the trials by the number of participants that were included in each arm; trials with > 20 participants per arm versus trials with < 20 participants per arm. We split pain conditions into headache and mixed chronic pain conditions. We assessed the impact of both conditions on four outcomes: pain, disability, depression, and anxiety. We extracted data at two time points; post-treatment (immediately or the earliest data available following end of treatment) and at follow-up (between three and 12 months post-treatment). We identified 10 new studies (an additional 869 participants) in the updated search. The review thus included a total of 47 studies, with 2884 children and adolescents completing treatment (mean age 12.65 years, SD 2.21 years). Twenty-three studies addressed treatments for headache (including migraine); 10 for abdominal pain; two studies treated participants with either a primary diagnosis of abdominal pain or irritable bowel syndrome, two studies treated adolescents with fibromyalgia, two studies included adolescents with temporomandibular disorders, three were for the treatment of pain associated with sickle cell disease, and two studies treated adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease. Finally, three studies included adolescents with mixed pain conditions. Overall, we judged the included studies to be at unclear or high risk of bias.Children with headache painWe found that psychological therapies reduced pain frequency post-treatment for children and adolescents with headaches (risk ratio (RR) 2.35, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.67 to 3.30, P < 0.01, number needed to treat for an additional beneficial outcome (NNTB) = 2.86), but these effects were not maintained at follow-up. We did not find a beneficial effect of psychological therapies on reducing disability in young people post-treatment (SMD -0.26, 95% CI -0.56 to 0.03), but we did find a beneficial effect in a small number of studies at follow-up (SMD -0.34, 95% CI -0.54 to -0.15). We found no beneficial effect of psychological interventions on depression or anxiety symptoms.Children with mixed pain conditionsWe found that psychological therapies reduced pain intensity post-treatment for children and adolescents with mixed pain conditions (SMD -0.43, 95% CI -0.67 to -0.19, P < 0.01), but these effects were not maintained at follow-up. We did find beneficial effects of psychological therapies on reducing disability for young people with mixed pain conditions post-treatment (SMD -0.34, 95% CI -0.54 to -0.15) and at follow-up (SMD -0.27, 95% CI -0.49 to -0.06). We found no beneficial effect of psychological interventions on depression symptoms. In contrast, we found a beneficial effect on anxiety at post-treatment in children with mixed pain conditions (SMD -0.16, 95% CI -0.29 to -0.03), but this was not maintained at follow-up.Across all pain conditions, we found that adverse events were reported in seven trials, of which two studies reported adverse events that were study-related.Quality of evidenceWe found the quality of evidence for all outcomes to be low or very low, mostly downgraded for unexplained heterogeneity, limitations in study design, imprecise and sparse data, or suspicion of publication bias. This means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited: the true effect may be substantially different from the estimate of the effect, or we have very little confidence in the effect estimate; or the true effect is likely to be substantially different from the estimate of effect. Psychological treatments delivered predominantly face-to-face might be effective for reducing pain outcomes for children and adolescents with headache or other chronic pain conditions post-treatment. However, there were no effects at follow-up. Psychological therapies were also beneficial for reducing disability in children with mixed chronic pain conditions at post-treatment and follow-up, and for children with headache at follow-up. We found no beneficial effect of therapies for improving depression or anxiety. The conclusions of this update replicate and add to those of a previous version of the review which found that psychological therapies were effective in reducing pain frequency/intensity for children with headache and mixed chronic pain conditions post-treatment.

Timeline

Login to access the full chart related to this output.

If you don’t have an account, click here to discover Explorer

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 71 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
As of 1 July 2024, you may notice a temporary increase in the numbers of X profiles with Unknown location. Click here to learn more.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 715 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United States 2 <1%
Spain 2 <1%
United Kingdom 1 <1%
New Zealand 1 <1%
Unknown 709 99%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 92 13%
Researcher 68 10%
Student > Bachelor 63 9%
Student > Ph. D. Student 52 7%
Student > Doctoral Student 37 5%
Other 129 18%
Unknown 274 38%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 147 21%
Psychology 96 13%
Nursing and Health Professions 61 9%
Unspecified 18 3%
Neuroscience 17 2%
Other 76 11%
Unknown 300 42%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 71. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 04 January 2024.
All research outputs
#652,974
of 26,744,914 outputs
Outputs from Cochrane database of systematic reviews
#1,087
of 13,274 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#13,379
of 358,648 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Cochrane database of systematic reviews
#30
of 231 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,744,914 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 97th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 13,274 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 35.8. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 91% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 358,648 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 231 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 87% of its contemporaries.