Thermal quantitative sensory testing in healthy Dutch children and adolescents standardized test paradigm and Dutch reference values

BMC Pediatrics

Research Article

Dick Tibboel¹  Abraham J. Valkenburg¹  Gerbrich E. van den Bosch¹  Monique van Dijk² 

[1] Intensive Care and department of Pediatric Surgery, Erasmus MC-Sophia Children’s Hospital, PO Box 2060, Room number SK-3284, 3000 CB, Rotterdam, The Netherlands;Intensive Care and department of Pediatric Surgery, Erasmus MC-Sophia Children’s Hospital, PO Box 2060, Room number SK-3284, 3000 CB, Rotterdam, The Netherlands;Division of Neonatology, Department of Pediatrics, Erasmus MC-Sophia Children’s Hospital, Rotterdam, The Netherlands;

关键词: Children;    Pain;    Protocol;    Quantitative sensory testing;    Reference values;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12887-017-0827-7

 received in 2016-12-19, accepted in 2017-03-08,  发布年份 2017

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundQuantitative sensory testing (QST) is often used to measure children’s and adults’ detection- and pain thresholds in a quantitative manner. In children especially the Thermal Sensory Analyzer (TSA-II) is often applied to determine thermal detection and pain thresholds. As comparisons between studies are hampered by the different testing protocols used, we aimed to present a standard protocol and reference values for thermal detection- and pain thresholds in children.MethodsOur standard testing protocol includes reaction time dependent and independent tests and takes about 14–18 min to complete. Reference values were obtained from a sample of 69 healthy term born children and adolescents with a median age of 11.2 years (range 8.2 to 17.9 years old). Seventy-one children were recruited and data of 28 males and 41 females was obtained correctly. We studied possible age and sex differences.ResultsThis study provides Dutch reference values and presents a standard quantitative sensory testing protocol for children with an age from 8 years onwards. This protocol appeared to be feasible, since only two out of 71 participants were not able to correctly complete the protocol due to attention deficits and were therefore excluded. We found some significant age and sex differences: females were statistically significantly more sensitive for both cold and heat pain compared to males, and the youngest children (8–9 years old) were less sensitive to detect a warm stimulus. The youngest children tend to be more sensitive to heat pain in comparison to older participants, although the difference was not statistically significant.ConclusionsWe present a feasible thermal quantitative sensory testing protocol for children and reference values that are easy to interpret and may serve as normative values for future studies.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s). 2017