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| CHILDREN’S PAIN PERCEPTION: IMPACT OF GENDER AND AGE Patricia McGrath, Ph.D., Director, Pediatric Pain Program, Child Health Research Institute, and Professor of Pediatrics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada Despite unprecedented scientific and clinical advances in our understanding of children's pain and in our ability to alleviate their suffering, several important research challenges remain. There is continuing evidence that the unique pain problems of infants, children and adolescents are often not recognized and subsequently not treated. While we know that children, like adults, experience many types of acute, recurrent, and persistent pain, there is little information available about the prevalence, health care cost, and burden of illness associated with different types of pain in children. Thus, we lack essential data for health care planning about the prevalence of childhood pain, and particularly the impact of age, gender, and socio-economic factors that may make certain subgroups of children more vulnerable for recurrent pain syndromes or for persistent pain problems. The presentation begins with a brief review of the data on gender-related trends in children's pain perception - from both interview studies, examining children's attitudes about pain, and observational studies, evaluating children's pain during invasive medical procedures. This review will focus on whether gender may influence pain sensitivity versus pain behaviours and whether some of the reported gender differences are due to developmental-experiential differences. The presentation concludes with a description of a recent survey study on the prevalence of acute, recurrent, and persistent pain in 187 children ages 5 to 16, that revealed several age- and gender-related trends in the proportion of children with different types of pain and specific gender related differences in pain intensity for acute pain caused by trauma and disease. The comparison of children's pain experiences according to age, gender, and health status, revealed interesting patterns that reflect the dynamic influences of developmental and experiential factors in shaping children's pain perceptions.
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