Dental students must learn all dental treatment techniques necessitated for public oral health due to their future professional responsibilities. Furthermore, there are limited experiences regarding dental treatments under general anesthesia for the children in the country , so , little is known on the student’s knowledge in this aspect .Therefore , the present study was done to assess the knowledge and attitudes of the dentalStudents at their final year of education in Tehran city on 2009-2010.
Methods: In this descriptive and cross sectional study,72 volunteer students of Shahid Beheshti, Tehran and Shahed dental schools were selected by means of self-administered questionnaire. The questionnaire included questions regarding the student’s knowledge and attitudes on G.A in pediatric dentistry in the form of dichotomous (yes/no) and 4-scaled responses (completely agree ,agree, disagree ,and completely disagree). The obtained data were reported by means of descriptive indices and assigning 1-4 scores for the scaled responses , while the effect of different factors on the attitude scores were analyzed by means of linear regression.
Results: Of the total subjects, 79.1% were familiar or fairly familiar with the G.A, 63% intended to accept children at their clinics and 58.3% decided to use G.A for dental treatments. Mentally-retarded uncooperative children and uncontrolled children (44.4%),uncontrolled children (22.2%) , mentally-retarded and uncooperative children (18.1%) and mentally-retarded uncooperative and uncontrolled and systemic infected children (8.3%) were the most eligible patients for G.A.
Conclusions: The results of the present study suggested the students to have proper knowledge regarding general anesthesia in pediatric dentistry , the associated side effects or its indications while positive attitudes were existed among them. However, there was some concerns regarding the G.A side effects or inadequate knowledge presented by dental educational system, so that, they were doubtful to use this technique in some degrees.