Background. Eutectic mixture of local anesthetics (EMLA) cream is often used for local anesthesia during spinal injections.\nHowever, this agent has delayed onset of action while vapocoolant spray serves more advantages. The vapocoolant spray\ncontaining ethyl chloride has fast onset and is safe, low cost, and widely available. This study aimed at comparing the effectiveness\nof vapocoolant spray and EMLA cream in reducing pain for spinal injections. Methods. This was an experimental study on 94\nsubjects with 47 subjects treated with EMLA cream and 47 subjects treated with vapocoolant spray. The effectiveness of anesthesia\nwas assessed by using Numeric Pain Rating Scale (NPRS) and patient movement during the surgery. Results. This study found that\nthe pain scale was NPRS 0 (0â??3) for the EMLA group and NPRS 0 (0â??4) for the vapocoolant spray group. There was no significant\ndifference between two groups for pain scale according to the Mannâ??Whitney U test. For patient movement, the movement was\nreported only in one (2.1%) patient in the EMLA group and one (2.1%) patient in the vapocoolant spray group. Based on Fisherâ??s\ntest, there was no significant difference between the two groups for patient movement. Conclusions. Both EMLA cream and\nvapocoolant spray were equally effective in reducing pain during spinal injection. There was no difference in degree of pain\nreduction and patient movement between the EMLA cream group and the vapocoolant spray group during spinal injection.
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