Children's Perioperative Multidimensional Anxiety Scale (CPMAS): Development and Validation

Up to 5 million children are affected by perioperative anxiety in North America each year. High perioperative anxiety is predictive of numerous adverse emotional and behavioral outcomes in youth. We developed the Children's Perioperative Multidimensional Anxiety Scale (CPMAS) to address the need for a simple, age-appropriate self-report measure of pediatric perioperative anxiety in busy hospital settings. The CPMAS is a visual analog scale composed of 5 items, each of which is scored from 0-100. The objective of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of the CPMAS in children undergoing surgery. Eighty children aged 7 to 13 years who were undergoing elective surgery at a university-affiliated children's hospital were recruited. Children self-completed the CPMAS and the Screen for Childhood Anxiety Related Disorders (SCARED-C) at 3 time points: at preoperative assessment (T1), on the day of the operation (T2), and 1 month postoperatively (T3). Internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and the convergent validity of the CPMAS were assessed across all 3 visits. The CPMAS demonstrated good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha ≥ .80) and stability (ICC = 0.71) across all 3 visits. CPMAS scores were moderately correlated with total SCARED-C scores (r values = .35 to .54, p values < .05 to .01) and SCARED-C state-related anxiety scores (r values = .29 to .71, p values < .05 to .01) at all 3 time points, suggesting the CPMAS and SCARED-C measures tap similar but not identical phenomena. These results suggest that the CPMAS has the potential to be a useful tool for evaluating perioperative anxiety in children undergoing surgery.