Effectiveness of TENS in Orthodontic pain: a Meta-analysis

Introduction: Transcranial electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) is being used to relieve pain in various specialties for ages but till date, no concurrent evidence is achieved on the efficacy of this method to relieve pain, still it is used as a non-pharmacological method of pain relief. For orthodontic pain relief the literature is scanty, as the studies conducted are also very less, hence we conducted this metanalysis to pool the results of these scanty studies and achieve some concurrent evidence of TENS efficacy in pain relief caused due to orthodontic tooth movement. Material and methods: Medline/PubMed, Cochrane, and google scholar were searched for the studies of TENS use in orthodontic tooth movement. Studies having data for 24 hrs. and 48 hrs. after application of tens device were included. The results were scaled and pooled and statistical analysis was done by using python and SPSS software. Results and discussion: Our results were statistically highly significant in favor of TENS with a p-value of 0.0001 indicating that TENS is highly effective in orthodontic pain relief. Conclusion: TENS is highly effective in relieving pain from orthodontic tooth movement.