Pain management necessitates assessment of pain; the gold standard being self-report. Among individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), self-report may be limited and therefore indirect methods for pain assessment are required. A new, internationally agreed upon and user-friendly observational tool was recently published-the Pain Assessment in Impaired Cognition (PAIC-15). The current study's aims were: to test the use of the PAIC-15 in assessing pain among people with IDD and to translate the PAIC-15 into Arabic for dissemination among Arabic-speaking professionals. Pain behavior following experimental pressure stimuli was analyzed among 30 individuals with IDD and 15 typically developing controls (TDCs). Translation of the PAIC followed the forward-backward approach; and reliability between the two versions and between raters was calculated. Observational scores with the PAIC-15 exhibited a stimulus-response relationship with pressure stimulation. Those of the IDD group were greater than those of the TDC group. The overall agreement between the English and Arabic versions was high (ICC = 0.89); single items exhibited moderate to high agreement levels. Inter-rater reliability was high (ICC = 0.92). Both versions of the PAIC-15 are feasible and reliable tools to record pain behavior in individuals with IDD. Future studies using these tools in clinical settings are warranted.

Defrin R, Beshara H, Benromano T, Hssien K, Pick CG, Kunz M. Pain Behavior of People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Coded with the New PAIC-15 and Validation of Its Arabic Translation. Brain Sci. 2021 Sep 22;11(10):1254. doi: 10.3390/brainsci11101254. PMID: 34679319; PMCID: PMC8533720.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/11/10/1254/htm