App effectively reduces anxiety in children: 4 key notes

Cheryl Chow, MS, a doctoral candidate at McMaster University, developed "Story-Telling Medicine" to help fight preoperative anxiety in children, Anesthesiology News reports.

Here's what you need to know.

1. Preoperative anxiety in children can often lead to problems with anesthetic induction, postoperative emergence delirium, increased pain and delayed recovery.

2. Ms. Chow developed her app to combat anxiety and better prepare children for surgery.

3. The app takes children through a hospital-environment to help familiarize them with a hospital setting and the procedure they're going to undergo.

4. Researchers are studying the app's effectiveness in 40 children ages eight- to 13-years-old. The children who used the app before surgery had their mean anxiety scores fall by 246.5 ± 127.2 points. The children who had usual care only saw their scores fall by 126.6±122.5.

The researchers are going to modify the study for a younger audience. They focused on the older audience, because of their ability to self-report test scores.

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