The treatment of recurrent abdominal pain in children: A controlled comparison of cognitive-behavioral family intervention and standard pediatric care.

Abstract

This study describes the results of a controlled clinical trial involving 44 7-to 14-year-old children with recurrent abdominal pain who were randomly allocated to either cognitive-behavioral family intervention (CBFI) or standard pediatric care (SPC). Both treatment conditions resulted in significant improvements on measures of pain intensity and pain behavior. However, the children receiving CBFI had a higher rate of complete elimination of pain, lower levels of relapse at 6-and 12-month follow-up, and lower levels of interference with their activities as a result of pain and parents reported a higher level of satisfaction with the treatment than children receiving SPC. After controlling for pretreatment levels of pain, children's active self-coping and mothers' caregiving strategies were significant independent predictors of pain behavior at posttreatment.

Cognitive-behavioural treatment of recurrent abdominal pain in children: A primer for paediatricians

“…The most extensively described CBT program for managing RAP is the one developed by Sanders et al (19,23). Several other narrative reviews and descriptions of CBT for recurrent pain are available (17,26).…”

“…The goal is to minimize parental attention given to pain and to support the child in applying coping skills. For example, in the program by Sanders et al (19,23), parents are taught to reinforce (give attention to) well behaviour, respond to complaints of pain by encouraging the child to engage in an alternate activity (distraction), ignore nonverbal pain behaviour, avoid modelling pain behaviour, and learn to distinguish between RAP and other physical complaints that may require medical intervention.…”

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Pediatric Functional Abdominal Pain: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…6,7 The effectiveness of psychological therapies for pediatric FAP has been studied in several randomized controlled trials (RCTs). [8][9][10][11][12][13] Although a recent Cochrane review described cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) as a promising psychological treatment, this review also underscored that many RCTs have considerable methodological drawbacks such as small sample sizes and high dropout rates. 14 Moreover, a well-designed RCT published after the Cochrane review did not provide unequivocal evidence for the benefit of CBT because it showed CBT to be superior to a control condition but only according to parent report of the child' s pain, not according to child-reported pain.…”

Parent-Child Relationships in Children presenting with Somatic complaints: A Comparative Study

“…In the present study, the parents of children with somatic complaints were poorly educated and the trends support that Somatization was more associated with lower education [11][12][13]. In our study, parents of Somatizing children were mainly in lower occupations and even unemployed.…”