Abstract
Background and aim: Pain in children may occur resultant of various diseases, trauma and medical attempts. Nowadays dental applications as one of medical attempts are considered to be painful. This pain induces anxiety and affects behaviours during treatment. Especially, majority of children are extremely anxious and feel as if they will experience pain. As a result cooperation problems are the main factor for the failure of procedures in treatment sessions. There are many methods for evaluating pain-anxiety and they can be classified as behavioral, physiologic, projective and psychometric techniques. It is aimed in this study to evaluate the correlation between the level of anxiety before treatment and pain experienced during the procedures.
Method: Frankl Scale, The Children's Dental Fear Picture Test, Spielberg State-Trait Anxiety Inventory before anaesthesia and dental applications and The Wong-Baker Pain Scale, Visual Analog Scale after the procedures were implemented to randomly selected 100 child patients between 6-12 years old referred to the Pediatric Dental Clinic of Karadeniz Technical University Faculty of Dentistry.
Result: Correlation was found between scales applied before and after the procedures. The patients who exhibited higher anxiety scores to pre-procedural scales also resulted in significantly higher pain scores to post-procedural scales (p< 0.05).
Conclusion: It can be concluded that, children who feel highly anxious before dental treatment and have experienced more pain to this anxiety level could be related with their previous dental experience and personality characteristics. Keeping the patient with minimal anxiety will facilitate the dental procedures for both the patient and the clinical.
Log in or create a free account to read this content
Gain free access to this article, as well as selected content from this journal and more on nature.com
or
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Baygin, O., Tuzuner, T., Isik, B. et al. 1361 Is there a Correlation Between Pre-Operative Anxiety and Pain Experienced During Pediatric Dental Applications?. Pediatr Res 68 (Suppl 1), 674 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-201011001-01361
Issue date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-201011001-01361
