Effect of vibration devices on pain associated with dental injections in children: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Background Several methods including vibration have been proposed for pain control during a local anaesthetic injection. This study was aimed to evaluate the scientific evidence on vibration devices used to reduce injection pain perception in children. Methods The search terms were chosen according to the Medical Subject Headings MeSH and non-MeSH. Potentially eligible studies involved the subjective or objective pain evaluation in children receiving any type of dental injection. An electronic search of published studies in English language was carried out in March 2020 on Scopus, Cochrane, and PubMed databases.Of 1659 articles retrieved initially, 14 were eligible to be included in the systematic review, of which eight articles were excluded. The vibration devices used in the studies included Buzzy or DentalVibe. Four studies using Dentalvibe contributed to the meta-analysis. Results The results of meta-analysis indicated a mean difference of 0.057 for FLACC pain scores between intervention and control conditions (P-value = 0.740). Wong-Baker Faces scores showed a mean difference of 0.009 (P-value = 0.964), which also showed no statistically significant difference between the intervention and control groups. Conclusions The findings revealed that use of DentalVibe for Paediatric dental injections was not effective in reducing pain perception. However, use of Buzzy showed promising results.