The role of the sympathetic component of the autonomic nervous system on pain before and after third molar extraction– an observational cohort study

Figures

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  Fig. 1. Example of calculation of the composite pain/analgesia score (CPAS) for one subject of the study sample, who belonged to the “4 wisdom teeth” extraction (4WT) subgroup. How the two components of CPAS are calculated is further detailed in the Methods’ chapter

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  Fig. 2. Summary of the effects of the two challenges, namely the Valsalva maneuver (VM) and the deep breathing challenge (DB) on the hemodynamic parameters of the study sample. The variables displayed on the graph are the percentage of change from the baseline values; the black squares represent the mean value, and the whiskers represent the 95% confidence interval (CI) limits. When the null value is out of CI limits, this corresponds to a significant difference (p < 0.05) compared to baseline; when the respective CI limits of the variable for each challenge do not overlap, this corresponds to a significant difference between the two challenges. Those significances are without Bonferroni’s correction. The aggregated data are detailed in the Supplementary Table 1

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  Fig. 3. Summary of the effects of the two challenges, namely the Valsalva maneuver (VM) and the deep breathing challenge (DB) on the heart rate variability (HRV) parameters of the study sample, in comparison to the baseline values (BL). The variables displayed on the graph are box plots of the raw values. The interpretation of the HRV parameters is detailed in Table 1. The symbols ‘#’ and ‘$’ signal a significant difference (p < 0.05), respectively with baseline and between VM and DB (see Methods’ chapter for detailed description of the statistics). The aggregated data are detailed in the Supplementary Table 1

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  Fig. 4. Scatterplots showing the relationships between hemodynamic or heart rate variability (HRV) parameters that have been found significant (p < 0.05) in the correlation analyses without Bonferroni’s correction. The dependent variables are either heat pain intensity (experimental pain) or the composite pain/analgesia score (CPAS) (see Methods’ chapter for details). The parameters tested are either the increase in heart rate as observed under Valsalva maneuver (VM) or the LF/HF ratio (HRV parameter, see Table 1 for interpretation) under deep breathing challenge (DB). The values shown for each relationship scatterplot are the Spearman’s correlation coefficient (ρ), the p value for the comparison of ρ to the null value (without Bonferroni’s correction), and the coefficient of determination R2