What is the Clinical Significance for Improving the Pain Severity in the Pediatric Treatment? A Systematic Review

Improvement in pain intensity in children is the most important indicator of treatment success.

This systematic literature review aims to investigate the scientific evidence regarding the clinical significance difference for pain severity in children.

A systematic literature search was conducted using Pubmed, Science Direct, Medline, ProQuest, Cochrane, and WOS Reviews databases on 14.01.2021. Studies with the search keywords were identified and independently assessed by reviewers.

The search yielded 587 potentially relevant articles after the removal of duplicates. Of these, only seven articles met the inclusion criteria. All studies were original articles, two of which were a small sample a randomized controlled study. Different measurement methods were used and positive results in terms of pain severity with a treatment program. The clinical significance difference for pain severity was determined between 0.3 and 5.9.

For the clinical significance difference in demonstrating an improvement in the severity of pain in children, the values in the age ranges of the children should be accepted and used.