Reframe the Pain: A Parent-Led Intervention to Alter Children's Memories for Pain

Summary

Pain is a common experience in youth and influences youth long after the painful situations are over. Youth memory of pain after surgery can affect painful experiences in the future. Negative memories and feelings of pain, like remembering more pain than the actual level of pain experienced are linked to anxiety for future surgery. Research has found that children's memories of pain is linked to anxiety, pain-related fear, and confidence. Children's memories for pain can be altered after a visit to the hospital, but only a couple of studies have look at this.

The study will be one of the first to look at how well a parent-led memory reframing intervention to reduce youth's negative memories of surgery. We want to look at how a parent-led memory reframing session on youth's post-surgical pain memory.

The study will include 90 youth who have a chest wall surgery or a spinal fusion surgery at the Alberta Children's Hospital. They will be recruited at the Alberta Children's Hospital. There will be pain tests in the form of surveys 1-3 weeks before surgery, pain monitoring in the hospital for a couple of days, pain monitoring 1-2 weeks after surgery, a clinic visit 2-4 weeks after surgery for a memory reframing session, and pain monitoring 6 weeks after surgery in the form of a telephone interview.

Conditions

• Psychology
• Pain
• Stress
• Behavior
• Coping
• Emotion, Expressed

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Pain Reframing Intervention

Parents and youth in the intervention group will receive instructions about adaptive ways of reminiscing about the in-hospital and post-surgery periods. The intervention will draw from existing narrative-based interventions that have taught parents to reminisce with their children about past negative events in more elaborative and emotion-rich ways (e.g., using more open-ended questions, to follow in on children's answers by providing new details about the event, to talk more about emotions, and to praise children's answers).

BEHAVIORAL

Attention Control Group

Parents and youth in the attention control group will watch a neutral 20-minute video that is not related to surgery (Planet Earth). Importantly, they will not talk about pain or the past surgery experience.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Calgary

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

10 Years

Max Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-01-23

Primary Completion

2020-08-15

Completion

2020-08-15

Countries

• Canada

Study Locations