Experience of Pediatric Patients with Mini-Implants undergoing Orthodontic Treatment

Mini-implants are gaining achievement in orthodontics procedures as they provide maximum anchorage. The study was planned to evaluate different experiences with miniimplants among pediatric patients. This study was done among 86 patients with a mean age of 14±23 years. All the participants were interviewed with the help of a questionnaire containing information as experience during treatment with mini-implants, acceptance rate of mini-implants, complications faced during procedure and satisfactory results with the treatment. Visual analog scale (VAS) was used to record pain parameters. The data were analyzed by SPSS 16.0 software. Nonparametric test was applied to obtain the median of VAS scores. Most of the patients face problems with mini-implants during mastication of food (28.2%) and speech (23.6%). It also leads to poor oral hygiene in 16.4% of the subjects. The highest VAS scores were traced from the period of one to 20 h, i.e. (33.7-40.2). It was observed that most of the subjects get adapted to the miniimplants in 5-10 days. It is safe and sound to use mini-implants as an orthodontic anchorage device among patients undergoing orthodontic treatment. Mini-implants are unquestionably accessory tools for treatment of orthodontists and ought to be utilized in selected cases demanding greatest anchorage.