Publications by authors named "Ilana Shiff"

Introduction/aim: Young children's limited ability to self-report pain necessitates an understanding of the factors that influence pain ratings. The current paper examines the relative prediction of caregiver psychological factors and toddler pain behaviors on caregiver pain ratings post-vaccination.

Methods: One hundred fifty-six parent-toddler dyads were video recorded during pediatric vaccinations.

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Article Synopsis
  • Infant pain management remains a critical issue, with evidence indicating that unrelieved pain can have long-term developmental effects; thus, a thorough review of pain management strategies is essential.
  • The objective of the updated review is to evaluate the effectiveness and potential adverse events of various non-pharmacological interventions for managing acute pain in infants and children up to three years old, while omitting certain methods like kangaroo care and breastfeeding.
  • The review incorporated new data from 76 studies, focusing on randomized controlled trials comparing non-pharmacological strategies against a no-treatment control, and examined the additive effects of combining these strategies with other pain management methods.
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In neonates, a noxious stimulus elicits pain-related facial expression changes and distinct brain activity as measured by electroencephalography, but past research has revealed an inconsistent relationship between these responses. Facial activity is the most commonly used index of neonatal pain in clinical settings, with clinical thresholds determining if analgesia should be provided; however, we do not know if these thresholds are associated with differences in how the neonatal brain processes a noxious stimulus. The objective of this study was to examine whether subclinical vs clinically significant levels of pain-related facial activity are related to differences in the pattern of nociceptive brain activity in preterm and term neonates.

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Preterm pain is common in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), with multiple invasive procedures occurring daily. To review the psychosocial and neurobiological vulnerabilities of preterm infants and to provide an updated overview of non-pharmacological strategies for acute procedural pain in hospitalized preterm infants. We utilized a narrative review methodology, which also included a synthesis of key pieces of published systematic reviews that are relevant to the current work.

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Recent research has highlighted the need for a deeper understanding of the heterogeneity in trajectories of children's distress after acute pain exposure, moving beyond the group means of behavioural pain scores at a single timepoint. During preschool vaccinations, 3 distinct trajectories of postvaccination pain regulation have been elucidated, with approximately 75% of children displaying trajectories characterized by downregulation to no distress by 2 minutes postneedle and 25% concerningly failing to downregulate by 2 minutes. The objective of this study was to examine child and caregiver predictors of preschool children's postvaccination regulatory patterns.

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The relation between maternal and infant cortisol responses has been a subject of intense research over the past decade. Relatedly, it has been hypothesized that maternal history of childhood maltreatment (MCM) impacts stress regulation across generations. The current study employed four statistical approaches to determine how MCM influences the cortisol responses of 150 mothers and their 4-month-old infants during the Still-Face Paradigm.

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Psychiatric disorders are increasingly understood as dysfunctions of hyper- or hypoconnectivity in distributed brain circuits. A prototypical example is obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which has been repeatedly linked to hyper-connectivity of cortico-striatal-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) loops. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) and lesions of CSTC structures have shown promise for treating both OCD and related disorders involving over-expression of automatic/habitual behaviors.

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Episodic memories are not veridical records of our lives, but rather are better described as organized summaries of experience. Theories and empirical research suggest that shifts in perceptual, temporal, and semantic information lead to a chunking of our continuous experiences into segments, or "events." However, the consequences of these contextual shifts on memory formation and organization remains unclear.

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