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.