On May 29, 2025, at 10:00 AM, Vanessa Gorito, student in the Doctoral Program in Public Health, will defend her doctoral thesis titled “Pediatric Pain in the Generation XXI Birth Cohort: a clinical perspective on population-based data from childhood to early adolescence”. The thesis was supervised by Raquel Lucas and co-supervised by Inês Azevedo. The event will take place at Aula Magna (FMUP).
Summary:
Pediatric pain represents a frequently misunderstood, underdiagnosed, and undertreated medical challenge. Committees and organizations have intensified their efforts to enhance the understanding, assessment, and management of pain worldwide.
Given its considerable prevalence within the pediatric population, pain exerts a significant impact on children’s lives, with chronic pain conditions constituting a major contributor to the global burden of disease. A comprehensive understanding of the development of pain susceptibility profiles during childhood and their potential determinants may enable the stratification of chronic pain risk within the population, extending beyond the identification of organic etiologies.
Elucidating the epidemiology of pediatric pain is the first step in reshaping the overall pain experience. However, long-term follow-up data remain limited and inconclusive, thereby restricting our capacity to modify the trajectory of chronic pain and associated behaviors.
Therefore, the utilization of large population-based prospective studies presents a unique opportunity to characterize pain experienced throughout the first decade of life. This approach facilitates the early identification of children exhibiting a heightened propensity to develop lifelong pain phenotypes.
