Time to complain about pain. Children's self-reported procedural pain in a randomised control trial of Hall and conventional stainless steel crown techniques.

BACKGROUND: Children's pain in dentistry has undesirable short- and long-term consequences; therefore, less invasive treatments merit consideration.

AIM: To investigate procedural pain scores for two treatments for carious primary molars in New Zealand primary care.

DESIGN: This study was a split-mouth randomised control trial, with secondary outcome analysis. Children (4-8 years) with proximal carious lesions on matched primary molars had one tooth treated with the Hall technique (HT) and one treated with a conventional stainless steel crown (CT); treatment type and order of treatment were randomly allocated (allocation concealment). The Wong-Baker self-report pain scale measured pretreatment dental pain, procedural pain at each treatment and post-operative pain.

RESULTS: Data were analysed for 103 children: 49 children had the HT first and 54 children had the CT first. Procedural pain scores did not differ by treatment type, with 71.8% and 76.7% of children reporting low pain for the HT and the CT, respectively. Fewer children reported low procedural pain for the second treatment than the first (p = .047). Most children reported low procedural pain for both treatments (58.3%), although 41.7% experienced moderate-high procedural pain with at least one treatment.

CONCLUSIONS: The HT caused pain for as many children as the CT. There is an opportunity for better dental pain management in this setting.