Assessment Of Anxiety Levels Among Patients Attending Oral Surgery Department At Hamdan Bin Mohammed College Of Dental Medicine In United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Objectives: To assess the dental anxiety levels among patients attending Oral Surgery department at Hamdan Bin Mohammed Dental Clinics (HBMCDM) and to identify factors influencing dental anxiety level among the patients attending Oral Surgery department.

Methods: A cross-sectional study using a Likert-scale questionnaire was conducted to collect quantitative data from 206 patients at the Oral Surgery Clinics at (HBMCDM). Dubai, U.A.E. Descriptive analysis as well as independent-t test and Chi-Square Test to compare and determine the associations of the dental anxiety scores between groups was carried out using IBM-SPSS for windows version 24.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL).

Results: The prevalence of dental anxiety (MDAS score of 13 or more) of the 206 patients was 72.33% with overall severity represented by a mean score of 15.50 (SD ± 5.4). The maximum anxiety scores were reported for: planning to going to the dentist for treatment, sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, having a tooth drilled, having teeth scaled and polished, having a local anesthetic injection, and having an extraction/surgical procedure with the following anxiety scores respectively 2.12, 2.21, 2.70, 1.92, 3.05 and 3.50. There was a significant high dental anxiety average score among females 16.42 (SD ± 5.54) compared with that among males 14.65 (SD ± 5.16), p-value was 0.02. The average dental anxiety score increases significantly by education level (p-value 0.02). There is statistically significant difference between average dental anxiety scores among student 17.44 (SD ± 6.09) compared with the employee 14.92 (SD ± 5.34) and the unemployed 17.24 (SD ± 4.78) (p-value 0.03). However, there were no relation between dental anxiety scores and age of the patient, marital status, dental history and history of bad dental experience. The best-recorded technique to reduce patients’ dental anxiety was communication strategies (51% of the respondents) and followed by Tell-Show-Do techniques (33.0%).

Conclusion: From the study, it can be concluded that dental anxiety levels among patients in United Arab Emirates was significantly high especially in relation to teeth extraction and dental surgical procedures and the least anxiety scores were reported for scaling and polishing.