A study carried out recently concludes that statistically significant difference was found in mean injection pain score during a digital block of the hand when the Dental Vibe device is used for vibration anaesthesia. But more extensive studies are still needed to confirm our findings. The infiltration of local anesthetic is expressed by patients as a painful procedure. Vibration anaesthesia has been studied in the dental literature as a promising tool that helps to reduce the pain from dental nerve blocks. Many such kinds of studies revealed the use of a specific device, the Dental Vibe. To date, no such reviews have been found, which had applied this technology to digital blocks of the hand in human subjects. Therefore it was hypothesised that the use of microvibratory stimulation during digital blocks of the side, would decrease the pain reported by patients.

It was a prospective, randomised, controlled, split-finger study. It involved 25 healthy individuals of 18 to 65 years old, who received digital block anaesthesia for hand digit therapy in the presence of study authors. It was a study of 24 months period at an academic emergency department. For this study, a sample size of 50 injections (25 subjects) was required for a power of 80% to evaluate the mean difference of 2 (SD, 2.5) on the pain scale. A 2-sided dorsal injection approach was used for digital blocks. Subjects were randomised to either intervention (vibration) for the first injection or sham (device off). Both intervention and sham were held in place for 5 seconds before and during injection. Subjects were injected with two mL of 1% lidocaine and asked to rate the injection pain on a 1- to a 10-point scale. This process was then repeated. Mean pain scores were compared using paired t-tests. Our primary outcome was the difference in the mean injection pain score between sham versus intervention groups.

There were 25 patients in the comparison group (mean age, 35.52 years [range, 18-58 years]; 8 females; 11 non-Hispanic white). The conventional injection pain score in the sham group was 4.28 (95% confidence interval [CI], 3.14-5.42), and in the intervention group, the mean pain score was 2.52 (95% CI, 1.62-3.42). For the initial result, the mean injection pain score difference between the sham and intervention groups across all subjects was 1.76 (95% CI, 0.49-3.03; P = 0.009). The mean injection pain score differences were similar across groups: females versus males (0.24; 95% CI, -2.31 to 2.79; P = 0.85), non-Hispanic whites versus other races (0.76; 95% CI, -1.78 to 3.29; P = 0.54), intervention first versus sham first (-0.43; 95% CI, -3.25 to 2.40; P = 0.75).