Pain levels and typical symptoms of acute endodontic infections: a prospective, observational study

This study aimed to identify key symptoms that could be associated with the diagnosis of acute forms of symptomatic apical periodontitis (SAP) and symptomatic irreversible pulpitis (SIP), and to identify a diagnostic algorithm based on these symptoms.

In this prospective, observational study 173 emergency patients diagnosed with acute pain of endodontic origin and no swelling or fistula were included. Patients were asked 11 specific questions from a checklist with a possible discerning value between acute SAP and acute SIP. Pain levels were recorded using the numeric rating scale (NRS-11). Subsequently, the painful tooth was diagnosed. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the checklist regarding its differentiation between SAP (N = 103) and SIP (N = 70). Moreover, a decision tree was constructed based on recursive partitioning to identify a hierarchy in differentiating symptoms.

With identical median NRS-11 scores of 8, the teeth diagnosed with acute SAP and SIP were severely painful. The decision tree analysis resulted in a tree with splits according to pain on cold, perceived tooth extrusion, and pain duration. The overall sensitivity of the tree to detect SAP based on key symptoms was 95 %, its specificity was 31 %.

The best indicator for SAP was a reported absence of pain to cold stimuli. In teeth that did have a history of pain triggered by cold stimuli, the decision tree correctly identified SAP in 72 % of the teeth that felt too high and had hurt for less than one week.