Group-Based Psychological Interventions for Autistic Youth with Chronic Pain: Narrative Review and Practice Considerations for Intensive Interdisciplinary Pediatric Pain Treatment.

This review looks at how to better help autistic young people who have chronic pain by adapting group pain treatment programs. The authors combine research from autism and pain management to suggest ways to make these programs work better for autistic participants. They provide practical ideas for changing group treatments while recognizing that group settings may not suit all autistic youth.

This narrative review examines how to adapt Intensive Interdisciplinary Pediatric Pain Treatment (IIPT) programs for autistic youth with chronic pain. The authors synthesize evidence from pediatric pain psychology and autism intervention literatures to identify adaptation opportunities, focusing on group-based CBT/ACT treatments. They provide clinical characteristics of autistic adolescents in IIPTs, bridge autism and pain treatment literature, and offer practical examples of IIPT group modifications. The review emphasizes the clinical and ethical importance of making reasonable autism-informed adjustments within existing IIPT frameworks while acknowledging constraints of group formats and the need for flexible care pathways.

Clinicians should consider autism-informed adaptations when delivering group-based pain treatments. Flexible care pathways are essential as group formats may not suit all autistic youth. There is clinical and ethical urgency to adapt existing IIPT frameworks while awaiting more empirical research.

This is a narrative review without systematic methodology. No sample size reported. Findings are based on synthesis of existing literature rather than new empirical data. Clinical examples are partly based on authors' experience rather than formal research.

Emerging work characterizing youth with chronic pain increasingly recognizes a large cohort of youth with co-occurring chronic pain and autism. This development has prompted questions about how to adapt Intensive Interdisciplinary Pediatric Pain Treatment (IIPTs) and the group-based treatments commonly used in these settings to improve accessibility, acceptability, and utility for autistic participants. There is a need for clinically oriented literature that IIPT programs and clinical trialists can use to guide adaptation efforts. Given long-term risks of inadequately treated pediatric pain, we argue it is clinically and ethically important to identify reasonable autism-informed adjustments within existing IIPT frameworks, even as more empirical work unfolds to inform nuance.

In this narrative review, we synthesize evidence from pediatric pain psychology and autism intervention literatures to identify overlapping mechanisms and opportunities for adaptation, with a specific focus on group-based CBT/ACT-oriented treatments delivered in IIPTs. We summarize emerging clinical characteristics of autistic adolescents enrolled in IIPTs, bridge autism and pediatric pain group treatment literature, map that literature onto pediatric pain targets and autism-informed IIPT group design considerations and provide practical examples of IIPT group modifications extended from the existing data and the authors' clinical experience delivering group-based pain psychology services to autistic youth in IIPTs. We also highlight constraints of group formats for autistic youth and emphasize flexible pathways of care.