Topical Pharyngeal Anesthesia for Upper Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

TO THE EDITOR: The article on topical pharyngeal anesthesia by Davis et al. was interesting (1). The amnesic effect of benzodiazepines can confound the results as the authors themselves have mentioned. They have quoted a study by Hedenbro et al., in which less discomfort was experienced by patients given topical anesthesia (2). We had also published a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study on the use of pharyngeal anesthesia in unsedated patients (3). In this study, we evaluated 153 consecutive patients using visual analog scores. We did not find any significant difference in the patient discomfort scores in the two study arms.