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

This prospective study aimed to evaluate the analgesic effects of acetaminophen and Transcutaneous Electric Nerve Stimulation (TENS) therapy for pain control. 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. 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. 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.