Dentistry

Biography

Biography: Zikra A Alkhayal

Abstract

Children often have caries and need dental treatment for their primary, mixed, or permanent dentitions. The ability of children to accept and cope with dental procedures varies along a continuum of cooperativeness and depends on a host of prominent factors including age, cognitive and emotional attributes, personality and temperament characteristics, parental, sibling or peer influences, social skills, degree of pain tolerance, and past experiences in medical, dental or other setting. Most children are relatively easy to treat in the dental operatory and respond well to guidance and information given to them by the dental team. They have coping skills and temperaments that contain any arising anxieties associated with dental procedures. A minority of children are not cooperative. They may have normal cognitive function but poor coping skills for handling situational anxieties and fears associated with dentistry. Others may have emotional, physical or cognitive problems that with poor coping skills cause them to respond in a disruptive and uncontrolled ways.It is often quoted that the majority of children will accept dentistry if managed with routine behavioral techniques but some children primarily due to variably- expressed degrees of fear and/or anxiety, will require more rigorous methods such as sedation to render quality care. Conscious sedation is used in pediatric dentistry as elsewhere to reduce fear and anxiety in pediatric patients and so promote favorable treatment outcomes. This can help to develop a long-term positive psychological response to necessary dental procedures. Currently, different forms of sedation, for example, oral, intravenous, inhalation, intranasal and combinations of treatments are used for pediatric dental patients worldwide. Currently, inhalation sedation using nitrous oxide is suggested as the treatment of choice for pediatric patients in the primary dental care setting. The aim of this presentation is to give an overview of Nitrous Oxide Inhalational Sedation in children and its effectiveness. Further, a discussion of alternative methods of sedation in children will be reviewed to examine the use of Nitrous Oxide Inhalational Sedation in current Pediatric Practice.