Music versus distraction for procedural pain and anxiety in patients with cancer. Randomized clinical trial of distraction for infant immunization pain. Distraction with a hand-held video game reduces pediatric preoperative anxiety. Use of distraction with children during an acute pain experience. Parents as distraction coaches during i.v. insertion: a randomized study. TENS and optokinetic stimulation in neglect therapy after cerebrovascular accident: a randomized controlled study. Reducing infant immunization distress through distraction. Short- and long-term efficacy of brief cognitive-behavioral therapy for patients with chronic temporomandibular disorder pain: a randomized, controlled trial. Distraction therapy with nature sights and sounds reduces pain during flexible bronchoscopy: a complementary approach to routine analgesia.
To test the hypotheses that the effects of a music intervention are greater than those of simple distraction and that either intervention is better at controlling procedural pain and anxiety than treatment as usual.
                Randomized, controlled experiment.
                A midwestern comprehensive cancer center.
                60 people with cancer having noxious medical procedures such as tissue biopsy or port placement or removal; 58 provided usable data.
                Participants completed measures of pain and anxiety before and after their medical procedures and provided a rating of perceived control over pain and anxiety after the procedure.
                Procedural pain, state anxiety, and perceived control over pain and anxiety.
                Contrary to hypotheses, outcomes achieved with music did not differ from those achieved with simple distraction. Moreover, outcomes achieved under treatment as usual were not significantly different from those obtained with music or distraction interventions. Some patients found that the interventions were bothersome and reported that they wanted to attend to the activities of the surgeon and the medical procedure itself.
                The effects of music, distraction, and treatment as usual are equivocal. In addition, patients have individual preferences for use of distraction during painful or anxiety-provoking procedures.
                Patients having noxious medical procedures should be asked about their desire to be distracted before and during the procedure and offered a strategy that is consistent with their preferences. Distraction has been shown to be an effective technique for managing pain in children; however, few investigations have examined the utility of this technique with infants. The goal of the current study was to investigate the effectiveness of movie distraction in reducing infants' immunization distress. Participants were 136 infants (range=1-21 months; M=7.6 months, SD=5.0 months) and their parents, all of whom were recruited when presenting for routine vaccinations. The parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to either a Distraction or Typical Care control condition. Infant and adult behaviors were assessed using a visual analog scale and a behavioral observation rating scale. Results indicated parents in the Distraction group engaged in higher rates of distraction than those in the Typical Care group, whereas there was no difference in the behavior of nurses in the Distraction and Typical Care groups. In addition, infants in the Distraction group displayed fewer distress behaviors than infants in the Typical Care group both prior to and during recovery from the injection. Findings suggest that a simple and practical distraction intervention can provide some distress relief to infants during routine injections. Video games have received widespread application in health care for distraction and behavior modification therapy. Studies on the effect of cognitive distraction during the preoperative period are lacking. We evaluated the efficacy of an interactive distraction, a hand-held video game (VG) in reducing preoperative anxiety in children.
                In a randomized, prospective study of 112 children aged 4-12 years undergoing outpatient surgery, anxiety was assessed after admission and again at mask induction of anesthesia, using the modified Yale Preoperative Anxiety Scale (mYPAS). Postoperative behavior changes were assessed with the Posthospital Behavior Questionnaire (PHBQ). Patients were randomly assigned to three groups: parent presence (PP), PP+a hand-held VG, and PP+0.5 mg.kg-1 oral midazolam (M) given>20 min prior to entering the operating room.
                There was a statistically significant increase in anxiety (P<0.01) in groups M and PP at induction of anesthesia compared with baseline, but not in VG group. VG patients demonstrated a decrease in anxiety from baseline (median change in mYPAS -3), the difference compared with PP (+11.8) was significant (P=0.04). The change in anxiety in the M group (+7.3) was not statistically different from other groups. Sixty-three percent of patients in VG group had no change or decrease in anxiety after treatment, compared with 26% in M group and 28% in PP group (P=0.01). There was no difference in anxiety changes between female and male patients.
                A hand-held VG can be offered to most children as a low cost, easy to implement, portable, and effective method to reduce anxiety in the preoperative area and during induction of anesthesia. Distraction in a pleasurable and familiar activity provides anxiety relief, probably through cognitive and motor absorption. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a distraction technique in reducing a child's perceived pain and behavioral distress during an acute pain experience. A convenience sample of 100 children, ages 3 years 6 months through 12 years 11 months, scheduled for routine blood draws, was recruited and randomly assigned to an experimental or control group. During venipuncture, the control subjects received standard preparation, which consisted of being comforted by physical touch and soft voices, while experimental subjects were encouraged to use a kaleidoscope as a distraction technique. Results of the MANCOVA, with age as a covariate, indicated a significant difference between the groups. Univariate post hoc tests confirmed that the experimental group perceived less pain and demonstrated less behavioral distress than the control group. This study investigated the effectiveness of a brief Distraction Education intervention for parents prior to their preschool children's medical procedures. Forty-four preschool children with chronic non-life-threatening conditions were having intravenous catheters (IVs) placed for medical tests. Parent-child dyads were randomized into two groups. The experimental group received Distraction Education prior to IV insertion; the control group received standard care. Data were analyzed for two phases of the IV procedure. Phase 1 was the preparation for needle insertion; Phase 2 began with needle insertion. Experimental group parents used significantly more distraction than did control group parents during both phases (P < 0.001). There were no group differences for child behavioral distress or self-report of pain. There was a trend toward a group by phase interaction for behavioral distress (P = 0.07); more experimental group children showed decreased behavioral distress over time (from phase 1 to phase 2) than did control group children (P = 0.02). In a randomized controlled type Ib study, the effectiveness of three different forms of therapy for the treatment of visual neglect was assessed by comparing therapy outcomes in three groups of patients after cerebrovascular accidents.
                A control group received only standard exploration training, whilst the second and third group received exploration training combined with either contralateral transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) or optokinetic stimulation (OKS) respectively.
                It was found that exploration training alone resulted in no improvement on both standard neglect tests (NTs) and everyday-relevant measures of reading and writing performance. In contrast, the groups receiving TENS or OKS showed significant improvements in both sets of measures with the difference that for the TENS group the improvement in NT scores at the end of therapy had disappeared 1-week later. However, both treatments resulted in significant improvements in reading and writing which were still present upon retesting 1-week after the end of therapy.
                Both methods can be recommended for neglect therapy and are superior to exploration therapy alone. Infant procedural distress is largely understudied, and there is a dearth of empirically supported interventions in the child health psychology literature. This study examined nurse-directed distraction for reducing infant immunization distress. Ninety infants and their parents were randomly assigned to a distraction condition (i.e., nurses used stimuli to divert infants' attention) or a typical care condition. Outcome measures were an observational scale, parent and nurse ratings, and infant heart rate. Results indicated that infants engaged in distraction and that distraction reduced their behavioral distress; however, ratings and heart rate were inconclusive. Analyses of procedural phases indicated that infants exhibited elevated distress immediately prior to and during an injection, but this distress was fleeting. We evaluated the short- and long-term efficacy of a brief cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for chronic temporomandibular disorder (TMD) pain in a randomized controlled trial. TMD clinic patients were assigned randomly to four sessions of either CBT (n=79) or an education/attention control condition (n=79). Participants completed outcome (pain, activity interference, jaw function, and depression) and process (pain beliefs, catastrophizing, and coping) measures before randomization, and 3 (post-treatment), 6, and 12 months later. As compared with the control group, the CBT group showed significantly greater improvement across the follow-ups on each outcome, belief, and catastrophizing measure (intent-to-treat analyses). The CBT group also showed a greater increase in use of relaxation techniques to cope with pain, but not in use of other coping strategies assessed. On the primary outcome measure, activity interference, the proportion of patients who reported no interference at 12 months was nearly three times higher in the CBT group (35%) than in the control group (13%) (P=0.004). In addition, more CBT than control group patients had clinically meaningful improvement in pain intensity (50% versus 29% showed > or =50% decrease, P=0.01), masticatory jaw function (P<0.001), and depression (P=0.016) at 12 months (intent-to-treat analyses). The two groups improved equivalently on a measure of TMD knowledge. A brief CBT intervention improves one-year clinical outcomes of TMD clinic patients and these effects appear to result from specific ingredients of the CBT. To determine whether distraction therapy with nature sights and sounds during flexible bronchoscopy (FB) reduces pain and anxiety.
                Randomized controlled trial.
                Teaching hospital in Baltimore, MD.
                Consecutive adult patients (n = 80) undergoing FB with conscious sedation.
                Nature scene murals were placed at the bedside, and patients were provided a tape of nature sounds to listen to before, during, and after the procedure. Patients assigned to the control group were not offered either the nature scene or the sounds. Measurements and results: The primary outcomes were patient ratings of pain control (a 5-point scale ranging from poor to excellent) and anxiety. In a multivariate ordinal logistic regression model, the odds of better pain control were greater in the intervention patients than in the control patients (odds ratio [OR], 4.76; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.35 to 16.7), after adjustment for age, gender, race, education, health status, and dose of narcotic medication. Older patients and patients with better health status reported significantly less pain. There was no difference in patient-reported anxiety between the two groups (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.39 to 1.96).
                Distraction therapy with nature sights and sounds significantly reduces pain in patients undergoing FB. Although the precise mechanism of this beneficial effect requires further investigation, clinicians should consider this nonintrusive strategy in addition to standard analgesic medications in patients undergoing painful, invasive procedures.
Clinicians, researchers, policy makers and recipients of care cannot be confident of the effects of distraction techniques from the findings of this review. The few pioneering studies are small, short and poorly reported. Further data from already completed trials might help inform practice, but more trials do seem to be justified as some of these potentially simple techniques, even if their effect is negligible, could be widely implemented and prove more acceptable than other more intrusive treatments.