Pain Evaluation and Treatment in Children: A Practical Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have presented a review entitled “Pain evaluation and treatment in children: a practical approach” aiming to provide a description of the best available strategies for pain relief in children, starting with the prompt recognition and quantification of pain, and following with the identification of the most appropriate therapeutic choice among those available for paediatric age.

 

The authors are to be commended for a well-conducted review.

 

Recommendations and suggestions for the manuscript are detailed below.

 

My comments:

1.     Page 2, Introduction, Line 49: Please insert a comma after ‘In the past’;

2.     Page 4, Pain assessment, Table 2: ‘CHIPPS’ is reported in the legend below the table, however this pain scale doesn’t appear in the table. Please correct and amend it;

3.     Page 8, Table 5: Please be consistent with capital letters when reporting the route for opioids administration. Please be consistent throughout all the tables;

4.     Page 8, Table 5: Please describe the abbreviation ‘CI’ in the legend below the table;

5.     Please be consistent in the style of reporting citations throughout the text;

6.     Page 12, Conclusions, Lines 332-333: Please rephrase the sentence ‘A wide range of analgesic agents are currently available, therefore, in order to choose the most appropriate treatment, we need to consider different steps’ in order to improve clarity and syntax, and increase scientific soundness;

7.     Page 12, Conclusions, Lines 335-337: Please rephrase the sentence ‘After acknowledging the severity of pain, a treatment is chosen accordingly, keeping in mind all non-pharmacological interventions that may help alleviate anxiety and distress’ in order to increase scientific soundness.

 

Minor editing of English language is required.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer.

Thank you for your comments.

We have reformulated the misleading sentences, capitalized the suggested words and standardized the style of citations. In addition, "CHIPPS" has been added to the table, CI has been specified, and a comma has been added into the suggested phrase.

Best regards.

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for this comprehensive review. I enjoyed reading it, and I believe this manuscript is a viable candidate for publication in this journal. However, there are some considerations that I added to the attached PDF. Please address them.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

There are some minor proofreading errors that can be easily edited using any free software like Grammarly or MS Editor.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your kind suggestions.

We have added them into the uploaded manuscript, highlighted in yellow.

Best regards.