Cooling Comfort: Enhancing Pediatric Pain Management with Pre-cooling Techniques - A Case Study Review

Abstract

Background: One of the primary causes of children's avoidance behaviour development is local anaesthetic injections. There has been an attempt to lessen the feeling of injection pain. Before local anaesthetics were injected, the impact of chilling the injection site on pain perception was assessed in this study. Methods and Material: In order to treat dental patients who need bilateral buccal injection of local anaesthetics, 50 healthy paediatric patients participated in a prospective single-blind crossover clinical experiment to examine their experience of pain. Before the injection, they were given a topical anaesthetic (Benzocaine) for one minute on the control side and a topical anaesthetic with an ice pack for one minute on the experimental side. An unbiased dentist evaluated each patient's response to the injection. For statistical analysis, the Mann-Whitney U test and the Wilcoxon test were employed. P < 0.05 was used to determine statistical significance. Results: For the study and control groups, the means of the sound, eye, and motor scales (SEM) were 4.06 ± 1.32 and 5.44 ± 1.79, respectively. The study and control groups' respective averages on the visual analogue scale (VAS) were 42.20 ± 12.70 and 58.40 ± 16.83, respectively. These differences were statistically significant (P < 0.05). Conclusion: Paediatric patients reported less discomfort when the injection site was cooled prior to a one-minute infiltration of local anaesthetics into the buccal mucosa.