Behavioural response of Individuals With Down's syndrome During a dental treatment

A lack of research has limited our understanding of the prevalence and
experience of pain and its longterm implications for individuals with
developmental disabilities. Little research is done to discribe the way in
which individuals with Down's syndrome express and communicate pain.The dental
setting provides the opportunity to observe these individuals during a
potentially painful dental stimulus.

Primary Objective:
Analyse the behavioural response of individuals with Down's syndrome directly
after a painful dental stimulus and compare this with video-analysed behaviour.

Secondary Objective(s):
1) Determine which observational scale can be used to reliably and accurately
assess pain during a dental treatment with individuals with Down's syndrome.

2) Determine the inter-analyst reliability of the two independent analysts who
analyse the video's.

3) Compare the response of individuals with Down's syndrome on a aversive
dental treatment with the response on a painful dental treatment (anaesthesia
injection or mechanical removal of calculus) to indicate behavioural
expression related to pain.

The participants will be videotaped during their dental treatment. These
video's will be assessed using different pain-observation scales to assess the
painbehaviour of the participants.
Directly after the potential painful stimulus (dental injection) the
participants will be asked how much pain they had. Furthermore, the dentist and
the dental assistent will give a score on how much pain they thought the
participant felt.
Afterwards, the scores of the different observation scales will be compared
with each other and with the scores given by the clinicians. Also the
inter-rater reliability will be assessed and the validity of the different
scales by comparing the scores of a painful with a non-pain stimulus.

Not applicable