This systematic review was originally published in the Journal of Dentistry in 2010.
The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination have now appraised the quality of the review and written a structured abstract of it.
They conclude that the review conducted a comprehensive search strategy, with a risk of some publication bias due to their inclusion of English language papers only. The reviewers did not carry out blind, independent assessments of the quality of the individual papers.
That said, it seems unlikely that any bias was so significant as to change the direction of the findings.
The review found that articaine was more effective than lignocaine in providing anaesthetic success in the first molar region for routine dental procedures. Note that subsequent pain scores were all significantly higher.
The two drugs were similar in terms of adverse events.
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