Pharmacologic Management of Acute Pain in Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Importance: Several pharmacologic options exist for the management of acute pediatric pain; however, their comparative effectiveness remains uncertain. Objective: To assess the relative benefits and harms of pharmacotherapy for acute pediatric pain through a network meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials. Data Sources: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Medline, Embase, CINAHL, Web of Science, and Scopus to October 2023. Study Selection: Trials that enrolled children (aged <18 years) with acute pain and randomized them to receive a pharmacologic analgesic vs an alternate analgesic or placebo were included. Data Extraction and Synthesis: Pairs of reviewers independently reviewed abstracts, extracted data, and assessed risk of bias of eligible trials. A frequentist random-effects model was used for all meta-analyses, and the certainty of evidence was assessed for treatment effects using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation approach. Main Outcomes: The primary outcomes were pain severity (range, 0-10 cm using a visual analog scale; minimally important difference [MID], 1 cm), need for rescue medication, symptom relief, and adverse drug events. Results: A total of 41 trials involving 4935 children were included. High- to moderate-certainty evidence found that compared with placebo, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) (weighted mean difference [WMD], -1.29; 95% CI, -1.89 to -0.70; modeled risk difference [RD] for achieving the MID, 16%), ketamine (WMD, -1.12; 95% CI, -2.09 to -0.14; modeled RD for achieving the MID, 14%), and mid-high potency opioids (WMD, -1.19; 95% CI, -1.83 to -0.55; modeled RD for achieving the MID, 15%) reduced pain. Only NSAIDs reduced the need for rescue medication (relative risk [RR], 0.31; 95% CI, 0.14 to 0.68; modeled RD, 16% fewer patients). Neither NSAIDs (RR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.31 to 1.55) nor acetaminophen (RR, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.21 to 1.87) increased the risk of short-term gastrointestinal adverse events. All other comparisons showed moderate-certainty evidence of little to no difference from placebo or were supported by low/very low-certainty evidence. Conclusions and Relevance: Compared with placebo, NSAIDs, ketamine, and mid- to high-potency opioids are effective in reducing acute pediatric pain. NSAIDs provide the greatest benefits and least harm, suggesting that they should be the first-line therapy for acute painful conditions in children.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".