Comparison of Two Standard Scales for Pain Perception during Local Anesthetic Injection in Children

Background and aim: local anesthetic injection is among the most anxiety-provoking procedures in children. some scales are currently available to quantify the level of pain experienced based on the child’s behavior. the purpose of this study was to compare two commonly used pain scales. materials and methods: this split-mouth study was conducted on 49 healthy children aged 3.5 to 9 years who needed dental treatment of bilateral primary molars under local anesthesia. the patients were randomly assigned to two groups. the level of anxiety was recorded at baseline and during local anesthetic injection according to the face-legs-activity-cry-consolability (flacc) and the sound-eyesmotor (sem) scales in the two groups. then, the level of pain experienced by the child was determined according to the visual analog scale (vas). data were analyzed by spss version 20 using mann-whitney and wilcoxon tests at 0.05 level of significance. results: there was no statistically significant difference in pain score based on vas after local anesthetic injection in the first and second sessions between the sem (p=0.877) and flacc (p=1.00) groups. conclusion: this study showed that there was no difference between the sem and flacc scales regarding pain perception during local anesthetic injection in children, and some parameters of the two scales that were measured in the children’s face area were behaviors that the children exhibited during local anesthetic injection.