(343) Adolescent and parent pain beliefs and readiness to change in the context of an initial multidisciplinary pain clinic consultation: Preliminary findings

Abstract

Chronic and recurrent pediatric pain brings significant medical, emotional, social, and economic consequences for children, adolescents, and their families. Parents play a vital role in seeking health related services and a biopsychosocial perspective of pain appears to be an important factor in the resolution of chronic pediatric pain. Health related beliefs and treatment expectations are associated with the degree to which adult patients seek help, adhere to treatment recommendations and/or become disabled. However, little is known about the pain-related beliefs and expectations that pediatric patients and their families have regarding chronic pain treatment and how this may relate to treatment course. To date we have enrolled N=6 adolescent-parent dyads in a project examining pain-related beliefs and treatment expectations as they relate to short term outcomes including pain, disability, and nonadherence among adolescents with chronic, non-disease specific musculoskeletal pain within the context of an outpatient multidisciplinary pain clinic. We will present findings from approximately N=30 adolescent-parent dyads pertaining to reports of pain threat beliefs and readiness to change at the time of the initial clinic visit. We hypothesize that beliefs of greater pain threat, as assessed by the Pain Catastrophizing Scale for Children and Parents (PCS-C, -P), will be correlated with greater readiness to change, as assessed by Pain Stages of Change Questionnaire for Children (PSOCQ-C) precontemplation scale, for both adolescents and parents. We further hypothesize that greater PSOCQ-C action and PSOCQ-C maintenance scale scores will be correlated with stronger agreement with a biopsychosocial perspective of pain. Demographic characteristics of the sample, descriptive information related to study measures, Pearson correlations, and Kappa statistics will be presented. Findings will be considered with respect to our broader aim of better understanding adolescent and parent factors that may facilitate or impede treatment progress.