The effects of distraction on tourniquet pain in healthy subjects / 重庆医学

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate the effects of distraction on tourniquet pain in healthy subjects .Methods Tourniquet pain was induced by the tourniquet at continuous pressure of 200 mm Hg for 10 min .20 healthy college students were asked to perform two distraction tasks during the pressure ,one of which is pictorial dot-probe task with three kinds of emotional pictures ,the other is word dot-probe task with five kinds of pain-related words ,and a control task ,in which no distraction task was performed .The pain intensity ,pain distress were recorded by Visual Rating Scale(VRS)and Modified McGill Pain Questionnaire short-form(MPQ-SF) . Results Compared with the control task[(4 .1 ± 1 .8) ,(4 .0 ± 1 .8)] ,the pain intensity and distress were significant lower in picture [(3 .1 ± 1 .3) ,(3 .0 ± 1 .2)]and word[(3 .3 ± 1 .4) ,(3 .4 ± 1 .5)] distraction tasks[(F(2 ,8)=21 .424 ,P<0 .001;F(2 ,8)=17 .962 ,P<0 .001)] .The pain distress in word distraction task (3 .4 ± 1 .5) was higher than that in the pictorial distraction task (3 .0 ± 1 .2) (P<0 .05) .Meanwhile ,for the last four minutes ,the pain intensity was significant lower in pictorial distraction task compared with the control task(P<0 .05) .And at the beginning of the experiment ,the pain distress was significant lower in pictorial[(2 .3 ± 0 .7) , (2 .5 ± 0 .8)]and word[(2 .4 ± 0 .8) ,(2 .9 ± 0 .9)] distraction task compared with the control task [(3 .7 ± 1 .3) ,(4 .0 ± 1 .4)](P<0 .05) .Compared with the control task (5 .0 ± 1 .6) ,the present pain index (PPI) was significant lower in the pictorial distraction task(3 .5 ± 1 .4)(F=5 .097 ,P<0 .05) .Conclusion The tourniquet pain was attenuated by distraction of cognitive tasks in pain in-tensity and pain distress .