Music Intervention Does Not Reduce Stress Experienced Before Intravenous Sedation

Objectives: Intravenous sedation (IVS) reliably reduces mental stress that may cause several intraoperative complications via autonomic nervous activity. However, IVS does not relieve the anxiety experienced by patients between their arrival at the clinic and the start of drug administration. Therefore, this study focused on reducing stress prior to IVS for dental treatment. Music intervention has been found to be useful for relieving anxiety in patients with dental fear before entering the dental outpatient operating room¹⁾; however, the effect of music intervention after entering the operating room has not been previously examined.
The aim of this study was to estimate the stress-reducing effect of music intervention before IVS for patients with dental fear in the dental outpatient operating room by using heart rate variability (HRV) analysis.
Reference: 1) Miyata K, et al. JDR CTR 2016; 1(2): 153-162
Methods: In this randomized controlled trial, 60 patients with dental fear were recruited based on a questionnaire for outpatients who were seeking dental treatment under IVS, and randomly allocated to either a music group (n=30, listening for at least 15 minutes before starting IVS) or a control group (n=30, no music). The effect of music intervention was evaluated by assessing HRV. The primary endpoint was the low-frequency/high-frequency ratio, of which positive changes indicate increased sympathetic nervous activity. Coefficient of component variance for high frequency, coefficient variation of intervals and heart rate were also assessed. Subjective anxiety was evaluated with a visual analog scale.
Results: There were no significant differences for the parameters of HRV. Heart rate increased significantly in the music group. Results on the visual analog scale did not differ significantly.
Conclusions: Measuring autonomic nervous activity, music intervention was not found to reduce stress in patients with dental fear before IVS in the dental outpatient operating room (UMIN-CTR 000028578).