The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Oral Health-related Quality of Life in Patients with Dental Anxiety

One of the aspects of health is oral and dental health. The purpose of the present study was to determine the efficacy of acceptance and commitment therapy on oral health quality of referrals to Isfahan dental centers.Materials &

This pretest-posttest clinical trial, with a control group and a three-month follow-up, was conducted on the patients with dental anxiety. In this study, 32 patients with dental anxietywere selected from among the patients with the criteria of the research and randomly assigned to two groups of experimental and control.The case group received 10 weekly sessions of ACT for 90 minand the control group received no intervention.Data werecollected using DAI anxiety inventory (DAI), Oral Health Quality of Life Questionnaire (OHIP-14), SCL-90-R questionnaire, and pulse oximeter. The findings were analyzed using repeated measure ANOVA in 0.05 p-value using SPSS.22 software.

The results showed that the mean (SD) of mental disability in the pre-test of the experimental group was 6.5 (0.9), which was 7.4 (1.2) and 7.5 (1.2) in the post-test and follow-up respectively, which was statistically significant (p value < 0.001). Also, the mean (SD) of disability in the pretest group was 3.1 (0.9), which was 2.9 (0.9) and 3.0 (0.9) in post-test and follow-up respectively and it is statistically significant (p value < 0.0001). The mean (SD) of quality of life in the pre-test of the experimental group was 23.1 (2.1), which was 25.2 (2.3) and 22 (1.8) in post-test and follow-up, which was statistically significant (p value < 0.001).

It seems that acceptance and commitment therapy is effective on the quality of life of people with dental anxiety. Despite the limitations mentioned above, it seems that the findings of this study can be a useful step in the psychological treatment of dental anxiety patients.