Paediatric pain: a year in review

There has been a steady advance in the understanding of pain measurement, prevention and treatment in children, and some of the recent progress is reviewed here. Important new discoveries in neonatal pain and pain assessment have overshadowed pharmacology in the past few years, although there has been good progress in the use of both opioid and non-opioid medications in children. The question of whether preemptive analgesia exists and can be utilized practically in children still puzzles us, but we are beginning to understand how to approach the problem, at least.