Maggio 2010 - Volume XXIX - numero 5
Focus
1Professore Emerito, Dipartimento di Scienze della Riproduzione e dello Sviluppo, Università di Trieste
22Clinica Pediatrica, IRCCS “Burlo Garofolo”, Trieste
Indirizzo per corrispondenza: barbi@burlo.trieste.it
Key words: Pain, Drug dosages, Association therapy, Pre-emptive treatment, Non-pharmacological therapeutic strategies
The paper deals with pain in children. In the first part the most relevant physio-pathological aspects and the changing patterns of pain according to age are described. The relevance of the maturation of the central nervous system in the perception of pain and in the evaluation of symptoms is discussed in detail. The age related epidemiology of pain is discussed in the second part of the paper, highlighting the most frequent and clinically relevant pain causes in the different periods of child growth. Finally, the basic golden rules of pain management are discussed from a pragmatical point of view highlighting the importance of adequate drug dosages, association therapy, pre-emptive treatment and non-pharmacological therapeutic strategies.
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Focus
Dipartimento di Pediatria, Ostetricia e Medicina della Riproduzione, Università di Siena
Indirizzo per corrispondenza: bellieni@unisi.it
Key words: Neonatal pain, Analgesia, Care
Neonatal pain is still today inadequately treated. This flaw is due to several reasons, among which the difficulty to consider newborns as patients like others and to understand their language. Newborns feel pain and it is our duty to prevent, recognize and treat it. More than 30 scales have been developed to evaluate pain, but a gold standard has not been found. We have good therapeutic instruments for pain treatment. It is necessary to use adequate analgesia also for minor invasive procedures: in the last few years the use of non-pharmacological analgesia has made big progress, e.g. instillation of sweet solution or performing sensorial saturation. However, in neonatal analgesia, attention should be paid not only to the use of analgesia, but also to doctors’ and parents’ suffering.
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