Abstract
In pediatric dentistry, it is important to control pain at the time of treatment to improve the cooperativity of children, and the use of local anesthetics is indispensable to give pain-free treatment.However, in the case of children, the injection for local anesthesia can easily be the object of fear, so how to give anesthetics with as little pain as possible can be the key to success of children's treatment.Several points for effective local anesthetic technique are : the use of topical anesthetics ; alleviation of visual fear ; technical devise at the time of insertion of the needle, method of drug injection(GSL method) ; and prevention of bite injury of soft tissue (especially lip).Also, with local anesthesia administered to children, problems are often present about safety of anesthesia and allergy. Results of a field survey shows that treatment using local anesthesia were administered to children of a wide range of age, and those who first experienced local anesthesia accounted for 16.2%. Occurrence rate of discomforts during and after treatment with local anesthetics were2.6%, respectively, but only several cases were suggestive of side effects of local anesthetics, all of them being not serious. Regarding the allergy to local anesthetics, the rate of positive reaction was relatively high with the children with whom our department had asked pediatric department to conduct allergy test. This suggests the importance of sufficient preliminary medical interviews and allergy tests as needed, and that coordination with medical department is desirable.
