The evaluation of the changes in blood pressure and pulse rate of hypertensive patients during tooth extraction.

The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the changes in blood pressure and the pulse rate of hypertensive patients having dental extraction under a local anesthetic containing a vasopressor. The study included 64 patients (42 female and 22 male), 38 to 78 years of age. Twenty-six of the patients were normotensive, 38 were hypertensive patients. The hypertensive patients were identified as those patients who had histories of medically diagnosed high blood pressure and baseline recordings of blood pressures higher than 140/90 mm Hg. Articain HCl with 0.012 mg epinephrine hydrochloride, was used as the local anesthetic for all patients and one tooth was extracted from each patient. Blood pressure and pulse rate measurements were recorded immediately prior to anesthesia, just before extraction and 5 minutes after extraction. The data were analyzed by a two-way ANOVA with repeated measures. Analysis of the data indicated no statistically significant changes in the systolic and diastolic blood pressures and pulse rate for all interval measurements in both normotensive and hypertensive patients (P > 0.05). In this study, it was determined that there were no significant changes in the blood pressures and the pulse rate of hypertensive patients during surgical procedure, and one cartridge local anesthetic with articain HCl containing 0.012 mg pinephrine may be used safely in hypertensive patients with blood pressure equal or smaller than 154/99 mm Hg.