Cartoon Distraction and Parental Presence on Anxiety in Pediatric Anesthesia

Overview

Nearly 50% of young children undergoing surgery exhibit high level of anxiety during induction of anesthesia because of exposure to unfamiliar environment and people and separation from parents. Increased preoperative anxiety may impact postoperative behavior changes such as emergence agitation, separation anxiety and sleep disturbance. Although some pediatric anesthesiologists routinely permit parental presence to reduce the anxiety during induction of anesthesia, previous studies have reported conflicting results. Recently the distraction using video game or animated cartoon has been reported to reduce anxiety of young children during induction of anesthesia. However, it was still undetermined whether distraction has its own ability to reduce children's anxiety separated from parental presence because they evaluated the effect of video method in the parental presence. The investigators design to investigated the efficacy of distraction with watching cartoon, parental presence and combined with watching cartoon and parental presence on reduction of anxiety during inhalational induction of anesthesia using sevoflurane. In addition this study includes long-term effect of each intervention such as postoperative emergence agitation and postoperative behavior change in children.

This study is different from previous reports as follow. First, investigators separate the effect of cartoon distraction and parental presence on minimizing preoperative anxiety and determine whether an interaction between two different interventions is existent. Second, investigators evaluate the effect of preoperative anxiety on the long-term behavioral change of children. It was not clarified yet in clinical practice. Third, investigators evaluate the effect of each intervention on parental anxiety before and after induction of anesthesia.