Retrospective Review of Voluntary Reports of

R e s e a R c h Local anesthetics are the most used and most important drugs in dentistry. They are also considered the safest and most effective drugs for pain control in medicine.1 However, given the large number of injec-tions of local anesthetic by dentists, adverse reactions are observed. These reactions may be local or systemic in nature. The majority of adverse reactions associ-ated with local anesthetics are not due to the drugs themselves but to the act of drug admin-istration.2-4 Most often, these are psychogenic reactions related to patient anxiety. Systemic reactions include toxicity from excessive levels of the drug in the blood due to overdose or inadvertent intravascular injection and al-lergic reactions. Local complications include postinjection neuropathy (or paresthesia), trismus, hematoma, pain on injection, needle breakage, soft tissue injury, facial nerve par-alysis, infection and mucosal lesions.5 Nonsurgical cases of paresthesia in dent-istry are almost exclusively related to inferior alveolar nerve block injection and appear to affect the lingual nerve more frequently than the inferior alveolar nerve.6,7 Available data indicate that 85%–94 % of such cases resolve spontaneously within 8 weeks; however, abou