ASSESMENT OF DENTAL ANXIETY IN PATIENTS VISITING A TEACHING HOSPITAL IN ISLAMABAD

Abstract

Dental anxiety contributes to poor oral health seeking behaviors. Dentally anxious patients seek help only in agonizing pain. Such a visit is often invasive and arduous resulting in stressful chair side patient-dentist interactions. This study was carried out to evaluate the levels of dental anxiety of patients frequenting a tertiary care dental hospital of Islamabad. The purpose of this activity was to evaluate baseline statistics for improvement of patient management and development of better psychotherapeutic treatment strategies for dentally anxious members of this community by implementing anxiety reduction protocol etc. A sample size of 367 was calculated by considering 5% margin of error, 95 % confidence interval and population frame of 18000 (annual turnover of the patients), using Rao soft sample size calculator. Tool used was the Urdu version of Modified Dental Anxiety Scale, in outpatient clinics of a dental teaching hospital. Analysis was done using SPSS, chi-square test was used to see the association. The mean dental anxiety score was 13.13 ± 4.938, with highest scores in questions asking about anxiety before local anesthesia injection and tooth drilling (3.28 ± 1.5 and 3.01 ± 1.4) respectively. Previous dental visits, gender, age, level of education, marital and employment status has no significant link with dental anxiety. So, it was concluded that patients visiting the hospital were moderately anxious about their dental visit.