Pain coping skills might be easier to learn and practice when teens have mentors who have had similar experiences.
Adolescents dealing with chronic pain may benefit from the advice and support of a young adult who has learned to manage similar symptoms, a Canadian pilot study suggests.
After the eight-week program of scheduled video calls with a peer mentor, teenagers said they liked the experience and that they were better able to manage and cope with their pain, the study team reports in the journal Pain.
“Young people with chronic pain can become socially isolated and many have never met another person with chronic pain,” said lead study author Sara Ahola Kohut, a pediatric health psychologist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
“By having trained mentors, young people who are only a couple years older than the teens, teach coping strategies, we believed the pain coping skills might be easier to learn and practice,” Kohut told Reuters in an email.
Chronic pain is a common problem, affecting between 11 and 38 percent of children and adolescents, Kohut and her colleagues note. Conditions like neuropathic pain, chronic widespread pain or chronic headache can lead to physical and emotional distress as well as causing teens to miss school, which affects their social development.
To assess how an online peer mentoring program might help teens deal with chronic pain, the study team recruited 28 kids ages 12 to 17 who’d been diagnosed with various chronic pain conditions at a Canadian hospital.
The teens were randomly assigned either to a group that would participate in the iPeer2Peer program or to a comparison group that was on a waitlist for the treatment. All the kids continued to receive any other usual care they were getting for their condition.
All of the teens in the treatment group were girls – researchers say that’s because chronic pain is more common among females and during recruitment boys were less interested in participating.
