Pain Measurement in Children with Functional Abdominal Pain.

Abstract

Functional abdominal pain (FAP) occurs frequently in pediatric patients. Lacking clear biomarkers, clinicians and researchers must rely on patient reports of pain intensity. Presently, there are challenges affecting our ability to use existing measures of self-reported pediatric pain intensity. This report discusses those challenges, finding that: (a) inter-rater agreement of children's pain intensity is generally low; (b) typically used approaches to measuring outcomes may yield high levels of unreliable reports of improvement;