[Psychological pain diagnosis in children]

Pain in premature infants, neonates, and young children impairs their development to a great extent and may lead to long-lasting pain memories and undertreatment of pain. Up to 15 years ago, the opinion prevailed that babies -- especially neonates -- could not feel pain generally, because they could not report their pain sensations to adults and were not able to verbalize their feelings. In the past decade, standardized scales have been developed to assess pain in children. While in neonates and children up to 2 years standardized scales were developed for observation of their reactions, for children 3 years and older self-report scales are used to assess pain sensations. The text describes a variety of standardized pain assessment scales which fulfil the requirements of reliability and validity.