Description

Dental anxiety and fear of pain during procedures are major barriers to oral health care, especially among children. Traditional local anesthesia injections can be distressing for pediatric patients. The fear of needle and dental pain are perhaps among the top reasons for avoidance of dental care. Photomodulation (PBM) is a promising non-tissue penetrating (i.e. minimally invasive) approach for achieving tooth and soft tissue anesthesia/analgesia in dental patients.Investigators plan to use an intra-oral PBM device with a tip comprising of a series of photonic emitters with specific wavelengths that can go through the tooth structure and bone, blocking the nerve conduction like local anesthetics. Research has shown that one burst of light application (for about 20 second) can provide up to 15-20 minutes of pain relief. This could significantly reduce dental anxiety and facilitate access to care and the implications of such an alternative to needles will be a gamechanger especially in pediatric dentistry. The proposed randomzied clinical trials will evaluate if photobiomodulation (PBM) with the near-infrared device produces dental analgesia comparable to local anesthetic injection in pediatric patients. This will be a series of three prospective, clinical studies in 200 school-aged children aged 6-12 years requiring routine dental procedures. The first trial will test the effectiveness of PBM in tooth and soft tissue analgesia by assessing response to diagnostic approaches such as cold pulp testing and gingival probing. The second trial will assess the pre-emptive analgesic effect of PBM on soft tissues at the site of injection prior to local anesthesia infiltration to reduce the discomfort of injection, and the third trial will assess effectiveness of PBM in providing tooth analgesia (compared to routinely used topical anesthesia/local infiltration) for simple restorative procedures in primary teeth.