Lignospan Special is a solution of Lidociane with adrenaline, available in a cartridge.
- Lidocaine 20mg/ml and adrenaline 0.0125mg/ml
- Available as glass cartridge.
- Box has 50 x 1.8ml cartridges
Pros:
- Ease of use.
- No chance of contamination. Any cartridge, if not completely used should be discarded.
- The cartridge is air tight and doesn’t allow any disintegration of ingredients. Potency of anaesthetic solution remains constant.
- Keeping track of maximum recommended dose is very easy, just by counting the cartridges used.
Cons:
- Expensive when compared to multi-use vials.
- Requires additional equipments viz. Syringe and needle.
Uses of Lignospan Special
- Infiltration or block anaesthesia
Review of Lignospan Special
I would concede, I am a recent convert to use of cartridges for anesthesia. I won’t go into the benefits of Lidocaine hydrochloride 2% with 1:80,000 adrenerline. It is basically used in cases where duration of anaesthesia required is long (approx 30 mins to 3 hrs) and risk of bleeding is significant.
You will require reusable syringe, preferably aspirating type and compatible disposable needles ( Septoject disposable needles, Septodont). This makes the whole set up and use costlier when compared with vial lignocaine anaesthesia and disposable syringes.
While using multi-use vials, we place a needle in vial for further use. This allows ingress of air into vial.
Even when needle is not kept in place, air ingress occurs every time a puncture is made to withdraw local anaesthetic solution.
Local anesthetic vials with needle pricked in for a longer duration can alter the pH (decreases the pH), concentration of the adrenaline and deteriorate the properties of local anesthetic solution. This can manifest clinically as delayed onset of action, increased burning sensation, and pain on administration.
Over a 30 day period, pH can decrease by up to 1. This can be significant clinically.
Other than deterioration of anaesthetic solution in case of multi-use vials, there is significant chance of cross contamination whenever we withdraw more solution using the same syringe.
Mutli-use local anesthetic vials are inexpensive but the potential loss of potency of local anaesthetic and chances of cross contamination are good enough reasons to use cartridge in place of vials.