Background:

Increasingly, anesthesiologists are often required to perform procedures outside the operating room. An interesting field is sedation in the dental office. This poses a major challenge given the remoteness of a hospital and the anxiety generated in the patient. Therefore a perfect balance must be achieved between anxiolysis and safety for each case.

Materials and Methods:

We prospectively studied patients undergoing dental implants. We compared the use of two benzodiazepines, midazolam (M) and clonazepam (C) and evaluated the satisfaction of both the dental surgeon and the patient.

Results:

We studied 67 patients. When assessing patient satisfaction the patients were classified as good and very good with both drugs. However dentists in the evaluation some differences were found between the two groups, in the M group, three cases were evaluated as fair and no cases in group C (p <0.05). The cause of this poor assessment was explained by the operator, as a result of these three patients not being able to open their mouths during the procedure. There were no episodes of desaturation, hypotension or hypertensive crisis in any of the patients.

Discussion:

We demonstrated that sedation with benzodiazepines in the dentist's office as a useful and safe alternative with either midazolam or clonazepam. However, the use of midazolam leads to a deeper state of hypnosis that would prevent the patient to open the mouth suffuciently, making it difficult a dental procedure. In conclusion clonazepam could have the advantage of achieving high levels of satisfaction from both the dentist and the patient.

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