Evaluating the effectiveness of low-level laser therapy in patients undergoing lower third molar extraction: A double-blinded randomized controlled trial.

Background: The use of low-level laser is a therapeutic resource that has been widely used in medicine in general, which has properties capable of modulating inflammatory effects such as pain, edema, and trismus resulting from oral surgeries for the extraction of impacted third molars. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of laser therapy at two different wave frequencies (660nm and 808nm) in patients undergoing impacted 3rd third lower molar extraction. For this, 30 patients were selected and randomly distributed into three groups with 10 individuals each (Control Group, 660nm Group, and 808nm Group).

Material and methods: Each participant, according to their experimental group, received irradiation before the start of each surgery and immediately after the surgical procedure. The data regarding edema, pain intensity, and trismus collected before the surgeries, immediately after, and after seven days were spreadsheeted and analyzed to determine the mean and standard deviation. After the Shapiro-Wilk normality test, differences between the experimental groups were determined using Multiple Analyses of Variance, considering a significance level of 5% (p<0.05).

Results: The results showed no statistically significant difference between the experimental groups in the analyzed items. Despite this, both groups irradiated with 660nm and 808nm frequencies experienced a reduction in the perception of postoperative pain, thus suggesting the benefit of using low-power laser therapy as an adjunct in the surgical treatment of impacted lower third molars.

Conclusions: Despite the results showing no differences between the groups, using LLLT resulted in lower pain perception in the irradiated participants compared to those in the control group. This fact supports the use of LLLT as an adjuvant therapy in patients undergoing oral surgery procedures to remove impacted third molars.