Does articaine, rather than prilocaine, increase the success rate of anaesthesia for extraction of maxillary teeth

OBJECTIVE: To compare the anesthetic performances of 3% prilocaine and 4% articaine when used for the extraction of the maxillary teeth. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Ninety-five patients, aged between 16 and 70 years, were included in this study. Patients were divided into two groups. Group one received articaine 4% with 1:00.000 adrenaline. Group two received prilocaine with 3% felypressin (0.03 I.U. per ml). Onset time of anesthesia was objectively evaluated by using electronic pulp testing. RESULTS: Eighty-five patients in this study had a successful local anesthetic followed by extraction within the study duration time (10 minutes). However, there were six patients with failure anesthesia (5 in prilocaine group and 1 in articaine group). By applying Person's Chi-square test (x2), there were no significant differences in the number of episodes of the anesthetic success between articaine and prilocaine groups at time intervals (P = 0.5). T-test showed that there have been no important variations within the mean onset time of anesthesia for articaine and prilocaine buccal infiltrations (P = 0.1). CONCLUSIONS: 3% Prilocaine with felypressin is as effective as 4% articaine with adrenaline when used for the extraction of maxillary teeth. Recommendations would be given to the dental practitioners to use prilocaine more frequently than articaine because of its low toxicity. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT04236115.