Postoperative pain management in children.

Postoperative pain management in children is a topic that has been neglected in the past but is currently an active field of interest and effort. Clearly, the child's cognitive understanding of and emotional response to pain are different than an adult's, and these differences make pain assessment and control more difficult. Ongoing work to develop more accurate techniques of estimating pain intensity in children may have helpful results. The effects of untreated pain in children are similar to those in adults but may have more long-term consequences in children. In the past, postoperative pain treatment in children was often inadequate, but newer techniques, such as continuous infusion of opioids, patient-controlled analgesia, epidural administration of opioids, and regional analgesia, hold promise for improved care in the future.