Evaluation of the Effects of TENS Therapy and Acetaminophen on Pain Alleviation in Initial Orthodontic Treatment

Abstract

Objective: This prospective study aimed to evaluate the analgesic effects of acetaminophen and Transcutaneous Electric Nerve Stimulation (TENS) therapy for pain control. Methods: Forty orthodontic patients who underwent fixed orthodontic treatment were randomly assigned to one of 3 groups: (1) acetaminophen, (2) TENS therapy, or (3) control. Pain was evaluated at 12, 24, 36, and 48 hours after the placement of both 0.014" NiTi and 0.016" NiTi archwires using a 10 cm visual analogue scale (VAS). Because the data were found to be non-normal, Kruskal-Wallis test was employed for both stage I and stage II intra-group comparisons. Results: For both stage I and stage II, evaluation of the VAS scores for all 3 groups at different time intervals showed that the difference between groups A and B was statistically insignificant (p>0.05). The scores of Group A compared to Group C were significant, and Group B compared to Group C showed significant values. Conclusion: Both TENS and acetaminophen reduced the pain experienced by patients compared with the placebo group. The acetaminophen group showed VAS results similar to those of the TENS group.

Keywords

• acetaminophen
• orthodontic
• pain
• transcutaneous electric nerve stimulation
• visual analogue scale