The Cochrane Library and Procedural Pain in Children: An Overview of Reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Procedural pain in children is highly prevalent, is a major source of pain, stress and anxiety for children and can have negative long‐lasting effects. Research into effective pain prevention strategies is voluminous and complex, presenting challenges for clinically relevant synthesis. Objective To summarize Cochrane reviews assessing the effects of various interventions for pain in children undergoing painful medical procedures. Methods The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews was systematically searched for reviews on interventions for pain in children undergoing painful medical procedures. The type of data to be extracted was determined a priori , and data extraction was carried out by one author. Main Results Four systematic reviews were included in the overview. Two reviews assessed the effects of interventions on neonates, and two reviews assessed the effects of interventions on older children. Overall, the quality of the reviews was good. Authors' Conclusions Many convenient, safe and efficacious modalities for alleviation of paediatric procedural pain exist. Use of sucrose, breastfeeding or breast milk is effective and should always be offered for heel lance pain in neonates. These modalities are likely efficacious for other short painful procedures and may also be useful for older infants. Topical anaesthesia reduces needle pain. Amethocaine was found to be more effective with quicker onset of effect than EMLA, although new topical anaesthetics warrant attention. Behavioural therapies such as distraction are effective, inexpensive and can be used in conjunction with pharmacological analgesics without onerous resource use. Pain research is complex, and achieving consensus on the best methodological approaches will make imminent advances in this field more readily attainable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".