| Dissertation |
Thesis (M.D.) --NUI, 2013 at Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine, UCC. |
| Summary |
Objectives Early tissue injury and recurrent pain in sickle cell disease (SCD) may alter pain and sensory processing. In this study, we evaluated thermal pain and sensory processing for 27 children aged 10.3 to 18.3 years with SCD and 28 healthy African-American children. Methods Quantitative sensory testing (QST) measures included heat and cold detection thresholds, heat and cold pain thresholds, and thermal perceptual sensitization, at the volar surface of the dominant forearm and thenar eminence of the non-dominant hand. Results Children with SCD were less sensitive to heat detection (P = 0.006) and cold detection (P = 0.016) stimuli at the thenar eminence compared with controls. At the forearm, no difference was found between groups for cold (P = 0.58) or heat (P = 0.07) detection thresholds. Children with SCD had increased sensitivity to cold pain at the forearm (P = 0.03) compared with controls, but not when measured at the thenar eminence (P = 0.084). There was no evidence that children with SCD had altered heat pain thresholds compared with controls. There was no difference between groups for perceptual sensitization at the thenar eminence (41% vs 39%) (χ2 = 0.15, P > 0.1) or at the forearm (30% vs 36%) (χ2 = 0.23, P > 0.5). Discussion We conclude that changes in pain and sensory processing were detected in children with SCD using thermal QST compared with healthy African-American children. Our results demonstrated that children with SCD were less sensitive to heat and cold detection at the thenar eminence and more sensitive to cold pain at the forearm compared with healthy children. Of the ten QST measures, seven did not differ between groups. These results suggest that SCD in childhood might influence subsequent pain and sensory processing, but our interpretation of the data is necessarily cautious. |
| Subject |
Pain.
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Pediatrics.
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| Collection |
Thesis Masters
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Theses Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine Department
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| Description |
156 pages ; 30 cm. |
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