Dental fear and anxiety leads to delay in the seeking of dental treatment and avoidance of necessary dental care which cause reduced oral hygiene and quality of life. The present study assessed the prevalence of dental fear and anxiety among patients referred to the Department of oral Medicine at Dental school shahid beheshti university of Medical sciences at 2007-2008.
Methods:
In this descriptive cross-sectional study, 400 volunteer patients were selected and studied by means of two standard scales of Dental Fear scale (DFS) with 20 questions and Dental Anxiety scale (DAS) with 4 questions. The patients ‘answers received scores of 1-5 and analyzed regarding factors of gender,age,refer to dentist by means of one way analysis of variance and student t tests. The reliability of patient’s answers to the questionnaires was assessed by cronbach’coefficient while it was calculated to be 0.88 and 0.83 for DFS and DAS scales respectively.
Results:
The DFS score of the participants were 40.71 16.9 and DAS score were 8.17 3.54.No significant differences were found in DFS and DAS scores according to age groups; refer to dentist and its time, having psychological disorder and martial status of the patients. Both scores were significantly observed between males and females (DFS;p 0.001,DAS :p 0.001).The patients DAS were also significantly different regarding the last refer to the dentist(p<0.01).
Conclusions:
It was concluded that the patients referred to Dental school of shahid Beheshti university of Medical sciences during 2007-2008 showed low dental fear and anxiety.