Background: Local anesthesia administration techniques are slightly challenging to perform and master on the basis of experience. It is always delicate to adjust to the first patient injection, especially in children. This study investigated dental practitioners' preferences toward topical and local anesthetics for children in Saudi Arabia.
Materials and methods: A questionnaire was sent through google forms to the participants, including sociodemographic characteristics, as well as perceptions of local anesthesia and topical anesthesia. The details for each demographic variable were based the gender, occupation, and experience years. Descriptive statistics were carried out using SPSS (version 24.0), where a p-value of 0.05 at a 95% confidence interval was considered significant.
Result: A total of 274 responses were received from Saudi Arabian dental practitioners, whereby 92.3% preferred lidocaine, and, while choosing local anesthesia, most participants (57.7%) considered precise bodyweight. The majority of the participants selected 27 gauge needles for infiltrations (46.3%) and blocks (63.9%). Short needles were preferred by the majority (93.4%) of the dental practitioners for infiltration, while long needles (83.9%) were chosen for nerve blocks. Benzocaine (68.2%) was preferred by the majority of the dental practitioners for topical anesthesia, and 55.8% of them were not aware of the brand of the topical anesthesia. The majority of dental practitioners felt that topical anesthesia was effective prior to administration of local anesthesia, and 83.6% of the Arabian dental practitioners expressed that patients complained regarding the taste of topical anesthesia. There were mixed opinions observed among the genders and occupations of dental practitioners regarding anesthetics used.
Conclusion: The dental practitioners' perceptions and preferences demonstrate that the most commonly preferred type of local anesthetic was lidocaine, whereas the most preferred type of topical anesthetic was benzocaine in gel form. Moreover, the most widely used factor in deciding the dosage of local anesthesia was precise body weight among Saudi dentists. The majority of participants preferred short needles for infiltrations and long needles for nerve blocks. The 27 gauge needle was chosen by the majority of the participants for both infiltration and nerve blocks.
Keywords: children; dentists; local anesthesia; topical anesthesia.