Effectiveness of Regular Breathing Technique (Hey-Hu) on Reduction of Intrathecal Injection Pain in Leukemic Children: A Randomized Clinical Trial

OBJECTIVE: Children with chronic diseases such as leukemia are subjected to pain during various procedures. Injection pain in children is so important that it is considered as the most stressful aspect of their disease. Distraction is one of the easiest and least costly methods of non-pharmacological pain relief that has not been paid attention to by nurses. In the present study, the effectiveness of regular breathing method (Hey-Hu) in reduction of pain of intrathecal injection in leukemic children was evaluated. METHODS: This study was conducted as a single blind randomized clinical trial among 100 patients coming to a referral hospital related to Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences, Yazd, Iran. The patients were 6-15 years old children coming to oncology ward suffering from leukemia. They were selected and randomly allocated to either regular breathing group or control group in equal numbers. The pain of children was assessed by Wong pain face scale and also general behaviors of the samples were evaluated by the researcher. In Pain Rating Scale, face 0 is considered happy because there is no hurt and face 5 denotes maximum pain. FINDINGS: Mean pain score in the regular breathing group was significantly lesser than the control group (2.98±1.68 and 3.80±1.30, respectively; P=0.01). There was no significant difference between the two sexes but in the regular breathing group, mean pain score was significantly lower in children aged above 10 years. CONCLUSION: This study showed that regular breathing can significantly reduce the pain of intrathecal injection in leukemic children, especially in those aged above 10 years. Considering the key role of nurses in a health care team, the researchers hope that the results of this study can help them learn this method and implement it in hospitalized children who undergo painful procedures.