Abstract

Pain assessment in pediatric postoperative setting has always been challenging, due to the lack of insight about pain mechanisms in newborns, infants and young children. Several research works about this subject were conducted over the years, and such studies contradict what was postulated for many years and demonstrate that infants do feel pain stimuli, even more so than older children or adults. For this reason, it is important for health care providers to be familiar with appropriate pediatric pain assessment tools, accordingly to age, cognitive development and context of the pain. This paper will focus on the diverse available scales and parameters used, as well as their advantages and limitations. Additionally, some recent developed technologies are briefly mentioned, some of which could translate a solution for this problem in the future. We still lack a gold standard for pain assessment in all clinical settings and pediatric age groups. Self-report, behavioral and physiological scales can be used for such purpose, although none of these methods has proven to be neither superior nor demonstrated excellent accuracy. Further research is needed in order to find and validate an objective and easy to use pain assessment instrument that could become a gold standard for worldwide use. The question about the best pain assessment method for infants and young children remains unanswered, being necessary to adapt the pain assessment process to each specific child and context.