Articaine versus Bupivacaine Anesthetic Effectiveness for Lower Teeth Extraction

An interesting article titled “A Comparative Evaluation of Anesthetic Effectiveness of 4% Articaine vs 0.5% Bupivacaine for Lower Molar Tooth Extraction” appears in Cureus in December 16, 2022, written by Tenglikar P, Manas A, Sahoo A, et al. (vol. 14, no. 12, pp. e32611). The article discusses the differences in the effectiveness of two common local anesthesia agents used in dentistry to control pain. The authors set out to explore the the effectiveness of 0.5% bupivacaine with 4% articaine in lower tooth extraction based on duration of anesthesia, onset, and pain perception along with observing blood pressure and heart rate. Today lidocaine (lignocaine) is extensively used as a local anesthestic agent in dentistry to control pain. Other anesthestic agents exists including bupivacaine and articaine. The authors conducted a randomized controlled study of patients having lower teeth extracted from June 2017 to October … Read more

Comparison of Bupivacaine and Lidocaine for Wisdom Teeth Surgery

An interesting article titled “Comparison of anaesthetic regime in patients undergoing third molar extraction” written by McCarthy et al. appears in Oral Surgery in 2018 (vol. 11, pp. 33-40). The article seeks to explore the use of lidocaine and bupivacaine which are two different anesthetic agents for wisdom teeth removal to see if there is any difference on patient pain, preference, and satisfaction. The authors state that using local anesthesia for removing wisdom teeth when also using general anesthesia is still controversial. They thus designed a double blind split-mouth randomized clinical trial where both an anesthetic and control were used on a patient at the same time. The authors conducted the study in two parts. In the first part 52 patients were given 2% lidocaine with 1: 80,000 epinepherine on one side and nothing given on the other side. In … Read more