24th American World Dentistry Congress

Pain control by local anesthesia plays a critical role in success of most dental treatments. Due to the unpleasant pain experience related to the use of the conventional syringe injection, some computerized techniques have been developed for local anesthetic injection. This study aimed to compare the pain score following infiltration anesthesia of the maxillary premolar teeth administered by the conventional syringe and automatic. This single-bind randomized clinical trial was performed on 35 patients whose average age was 38. Requiring bilateral extraction of maxillary premolars. The patients’ dental anxiety was scored and they received infiltration anesthesia with the iCT injection SE (Dentium, South Korea) at one side and conventional syringe at the contralateral side. The pain level was recorded during needle insertion, anesthetic delivery and 5 hours after the injection using visual analog scale (VAS) and the face rating scale (FRS). The data were subjected to Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Significant differences were found between the automatic and conventional methods regarding pain scores during needle insertion (P<0.01) and anesthetic delivery (P<0.0001) while no significant differences were noted at 5 hours after the injection. Pain scores were significantly lower during supra-periosteal injections in the maxillary premolar region using iCT injection. Both FRS and VAS in iCT injection showed that frequency of severe pain during needle insertion and anesthetic delivery was noticeably lower than that in conventional injection method but findings revealed that there was no significant difference between these two technics after 5 hours of injection.