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Volume 11,Issue 6

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26 June 2026

Meta-analysis of the Effect of Non-drug Intervention on Relieving Anxiety in Children Undergoing Pediatric Surgery before Operation

Dan Huang1 Qianrui Li1 Chuyu Li1 Lihua Li1*
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1 The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510080, Guangdong, China
APM 2026 , 11(6), 106–113; https://doi.org/10.26689/APM.v11i6.15129
© 2026 by the Author. Licensee Whioce Publishing, Singapore. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Objective: To explore the effect of non-drug intervention in relieving preoperative anxiety in children undergoing pediatric surgery through Meta-analysis. Methods: PubMed database (a foreign language database) and Cochrane Library (a Cochrane database), as well as the domestic mainstream Chinese databases of China HowNet, Wanfang Database, and VIP database were used for simultaneous retrieval. After the retrieval, the list of references that met the inclusion criteria was searched for all articles that were related to the theme of non-drug intervention in alleviating preoperative anxiety of children undergoing pediatric surgery but did not appear in the previous database retrieval, and the additional retrieval and screening were performed one by one. During the screening, the screening was performed in strict accordance with the preset inclusion and exclusion criteria. Finally, the data of standard-compliant RCTs were extracted and organized, and then meta-analysis was performed using RevMan5.3 software. Results: The effects of different non-drug interventions on pre-operative anxiety in children undergoing pediatric surgery were ranked as follows: virtual reality technology, game therapy, diversified interest induction, picture book scenario simulation, interest induction combined with seamless nursing, medical doll intervention, concentration dispersion method, and routine nursing. Conclusion: The results of the meta-analysis recommend the use of virtual reality technology, game therapy, and diversified interest induction to relieve preoperative anxiety in children undergoing pediatric surgery.

Keywords
Non-drug intervention
Pediatric surgery
Children
Preoperative anxiety
Meta analysis
References

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