Effectiveness of two flavored topical anesthetic agents in reducing injection pain in children: a comparative study

Topical anesthesia is widely advocated in pediatric dentistry practice to reduce pain and anxiety produced by administration of local anesthesia. There are different combinations of topical anesthetic agents that are marketed worldwide. However, sparse literature reports exist regarding clinical efficacy of these agents.

To compare the clinical effectiveness of two strawberry flavored topical anesthetics viz. Precaine (8% Lidocaine + 0.8% Dibucaine) and Precaine B (20% Benzocaine) in children before intra oral local anesthetic injections and for extraction of mobile primary teeth.

This triple blind clinical study included sixty children divided equally under three techniques--palatal injections, inferior alveolar nerve block and extraction of mobile primary teeth. Both the products were used alternately using split mouth design in two visits and the child's pain response was assessed using VAS and SEM pain scale. The scores obtained were subjected to statistical analysis.

Precaine has shown lower mean scores in all the techniques under both the pain scales, but were statistically insignificant. Gender wise comparison has also shown lower mean scores for Precaine for both males and females, however these were statistically insignificant. On visit wise comparison, Precaine B reported significant lower scores (p < 0.05) in visit 2 compared to visit 1 for inferior alveolar nerve block and extraction of mobile primary teeth under SEM pain scale.

Precaine (8% Lidocaine + 0.8% Dibucaine) can be used as effectively as Precaine B (20% Benzocaine).