Dental Anxiety Flashcards
List four treatment options for helping patients manage their anxiety.
Teach coping strategies: relaxation or distraction.
Provide realistic information.
Give patients some control - stop and proceed signals.
Specific pharmacological support - benzodiazepine or nitrous oxide sedation.
What is the aetiology for dental anxiety?
Peer and family views, negative dental experiences, media representations of dentistry, poor knowledge of modern pain relief.
Choosing two from the list of treatments, comment on their relative effectiveness.
Relaxation - effective for mild dental anxiety - has been shown to be more effective than IV sedation or nitrous oxide sedation.
Relaxation training - Jacobson’s deep muscle training technique - shown to reduce pulse (heart rate) and respiration rate
Drugs - effective for moderate to severe dental anxiety - only effective when there is a high treatment need but the psychological consequences would be too overwhelming for the patient and would be unwilling to have the treatment.
How is anxiety measured?
In adults - the dental anxiety scale
In children - the Venham picture test
Define dental fear.
A normal emotional reaction to one or more specific threatening stimuli in the dental environment.
Define dental anxiety.
A sense of apprehension that something dreadful is going to happen in relation to the dental treatment, coupled with a sense of losing control.
Define dental phobia.
A severe type of dental anxiety manifested as a marked and persistent anxiety in relation to clearly discernible situations or objects (e.g. use of drill) or to the dental situation in general.
What are the three pathways to fearfulness in children?
conditioning - experiences and dentists sensitivity to children’s fear
modelling - children’s imitation of parents behaviour
information - fear of unknown or of frightening information
