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Hypnosis for Relief of Pain and Anxiety in Children Receiving Intravenous Lines in the Pediatric Emergency Department

Intravenous line placement is one of the most common procedures performed on children presenting to the Emergency Department. Anxiety about needles is widespread, and many children experience high levels of fear and/or pain with their IV line placements. Hypnosis is a behavioral intervention that shows significant promise for alleviating procedure-related pain and anxiety in children. Twenty-five developmentally normal, English-speaking children between the ages of five and fifteen who required IV line placement in the Pediatric Emergency Department at Yale-New Haven Childrens Hospital were randomized to receive either the standard of care or standard of care plus a brief hypnotic intervention. The groups were similar with regard to baseline demographic and socioeconomic status, previous experience with medical care, and presence or absence of chronic medical conditions. Childrens pre-procedural anxiety ratings on a 10cm visual analog scale (VAS) and expected procedural pain ratings by 10-point oucher and 10cm VAS were not significantly different between the groups. Children randomized to the hypnosis group reported less anxiety during the procedure (mean 5.0 vs 3.1, median 7.2 vs 2.2, p = 0.28) than children randomized to the standard of care group. Cases also had a decrease in anxiety from expected to actual of 1.6 on a 10cm scale, while those randomized to the control group had an increase from expected to actual anxiety of 1.1 (p=0.01). A smaller trend towards decreased pain in the hypnosis group was also present. As measured by VAS, cases had lower mean pain scores (3.4 vs 4.3) than controls. In a comparison of anticipated and actual pain scores between groups, the hypnosis group had a mean decrease of 0.8 on a 10cm VAS , while the control group had a mean increase of 0.5 (p=0.14). Recruitment of subjects is ongoing, but preliminary results suggest that hypnosis is effective for alleviating needle-related anxiety in children undergoing IV line placement and may be helpful for alleviating the pain of IV line placement as well.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:YALE_med/oai:ymtdl.med.yale.edu:etd-08212007-115631
Date04 March 2008
CreatorsMaxym, Maya
ContributorsLinda Arnold
PublisherYale University
Source SetsYale Medical student MD Thesis
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://ymtdl.med.yale.edu/theses/available/etd-08212007-115631/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Yale School of Medicine or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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