Experiencing pain is common throughout a child’s development, from birth through to adolescence and beyond. This Cochrane Special Collection focuses on reducing pain in infants, children, and adolescents. The Collection highlights the latest evidence for paediatric treatments for acute and chronic pain, to guide practice, policy, and funding. It is important to note that pain research in the paediatric populations is often under-researched and under-funded. To highlight this deficit of evidence for the effectiveness (and any associated adverse events) of an intervention for children, some of the reviews in this Special Collection are ‘empty’ – indicating that there were no studies of children eligible for inclusion.
The Cochrane Reviews in this Special Collection have been published by Cochrane Pain, Palliative and Supportive Care. The reviews included in the section on pharmacological treatments for chronic pain in children and adolescents have also been included in an overview published in Pain. For further discussion on this topic there is also a related Cochrane Editorial – ‘Clinical management in an evidence vacuum: pharmacological management of children with persistent pain’ and an Evidently Cochrane blog.