Use of Handheld Audiovisual Devices to Treat Pediatric Preoperative Anxiety: A Randomized Control Trial.

Anxiety in children undergoing surgery is a central concern to both parents and healthcare workers, including nurses, surgeons, and anesthesiologists. It has been ranked by anesthesiologists as one of the top five important low-morbidity anesthesia outcomes (1). Extensive research has been done characterizing, quantifying, and risk stratifying anxiety in this group as well as identifying a multitude of treatment options both pharmacological and nonpharmacological. Up to 60% of all children develop anxiety in the preoperative holding area and during anesthetic induction (2). The incidence can be much higher in some subpopulations. Preoperative anxiety has been attributed to number of causes including separation from parents and uncertainty about anesthesia, the procedure, and outcome (3).

Interestingly, anxiety prior to surgery has effects that extend into the intraoperative, acute recovery and subacute recovery timeframes. Patients with high levels of preoperative anxiety have been found to require greater anesthetic dosages (4). There is a higher incidence of emergence delirium in children with higher levels of preoperative anxiety (5, 6). These patients also have with a higher incidence of postoperative pain and require more analgesic medications (7). Furthermore, there are well documented maladaptive behavioral changes that can occur in 30-54% of children two weeks following surgery (8). These include generalized anxiety, nighttime crying, enuresis, separation anxiety, and temper tantrums. Twenty percent of these children maintain this behavior at 6 months and 7% persist at 1 year after the operation (9). High preoperative anxiety levels correlate with these behavior changes (2, 5, 8,10).

Many other interventions have been tried to decrease anxiety with varying success. Most are aimed at distraction. Music therapy appears to be therapist-dependent (12). Hand held video games appear to help decrease anxiety, even during induction (13). Even having clowns in the operating room at induction of anesthesia seems to help -- the study concluded that staff were quite resistant to maintaining the clown program (14). Interestingly, a small randomized controlled trial showed that parents distracting their children during induction with novel toys and books or blowing bubbles did not decrease anxiety (15).

Few studies have considered the use of tablets as distraction tools for children undergoing surgery. Low and Pittaway briefly described using an iPhone™ to distract 93 children in the preoperative period (16). However, the results are simply anecdotal. Patel et al. described a randomized control trial using hand held video games as a means of distraction compared to midazolam and a control group. They used the well validated and extensively used modified Yale Preoperative Anxiety Score (17) to measure anxiety levels. However, this study included parents being present at induction in all the groups, which may make the results difficult to apply at the majority of institutions, where parental presence is not used - our institution included (11).

In addition, premedication may be given to 50% of patients nationally, but it is not popular among parents (11,18). If the majority of practitioners do not use parental presence at induction, preoperative education programs are not yet in widespread use and half of patients are not premedicated, that leaves a significant portion of the population with little intervention for the time of separation and for time of induction of anesthesia. Finding an economical, efficient means to help decrease anxiety without high doses of premedication would be quite appealing.