Background: Interdisciplinary pain treatment has been shown to be effective for children and adolescents with chronic pain, both in an outpatient and inpatient setting. Until now, the effectiveness has been analyzed with various outcome measures. Although it has only rarely been used for adolescents so far, Chronic Pain Grading (CPG) developed by Von Korff could be an appropriate general outcome measure.
Objective: The study aims at prospectively investigating and comparing the therapy outcome one year after initial presentation for both outpatients and inpatients using the CPG.
Materials and methods: Data of 258 adolescents were gathered at initial presentation and one year later and analyzed using the CPG. Changes from pretreatment to follow-up and predictors of good therapy outcome were investigated for the whole sample and separately for outpatients and inpatients.
Results: Compared to inpatients, outpatients were characterized by a lower CPG both before and one year after initial presentation. Large effects were found both for outpatient and inpatient therapy regarding the improvement of the CPG. In outpatient therapy, boys were two times more likely to display therapy success.
Conclusion: The study shows that the CPG is an appropriate outcome measure to display the long-term effectiveness of an inpatient and outpatient interdisciplinary pain treatment. The interdisciplinary pain treatment needs to be better tailored to girls to improve its effectiveness.
Keywords: Adolescents; Chronic pain; Effectiveness; Interdisciplinary pain therapy; Pain severity.