General Anxiety and Dental Fear: Is There A Relationship?

Anxiety is an emotional state that helps healthy people defend themselves against threats. Dental anxiety is referred to a patient's specific response to stressful dental practices. The prevalence of dental anxiety is estimated to be between 3-43%. The relation between dental caries and dental anxiety is well understood, which happen as the result of patient’s avoidance of dental visits. We aimed to measure dental fear in patients and evaluate its relationship with general anxiety.

This cross-sectional study was performed on 90 patients referred to Oral medicine Department of Rasht Dental School in winter 2016. The severity of dental fear was measured by DFS Questionnaire and the level of general anxiety was measured by Cattell’s anxiety scale. Pearson’s correlation coefficient, t-test, and ANOVA were used for data analysis.

Total anxiety in 81 (90%) of the subjects was higher than the average. The mean total score of anxiety was 5.74 (SD=1.82). Sixty one (67.8%) of the patients had significantly higher anxiety than average and anxiety level in 70 (77.8%) of them was more than moderate. Pearson’s correlation coefficient showed that there was a positive and significant relationship between general anxiety and dental anxiety (P<0.01, R=0.262). Independent t-test showed that the mean score of dental anxiety in males (M=33.82, SD=14.96) was significantly less than females (F=40.09) (P=0.048).

According to the results of this research, there is a significant correlation between dental anxiety and general anxiety and also between dental anxiety and gender.