A comparative evaluation of role of gender, age and socioeconomic status on perceived dental anxiety of 4-8 years old children using two scales

Abstract

Dental anxiety is a common problem that affects people of all ages and appears to develop mostly in childhood and adolescence. Dental anxiety in children has been recognized as a problem in patient management for many years. It is important that dentists are able to assess dental anxiety in child patients as early as possible so that they may identify patients who are in special need with regards to their fear. Age, gender and socioeconomic status play an important role as determining factors in dental anxiety, hence should be considered while measuring dental anxiety. Materials and Methods: A randomized control study was conducted in 4 to 8 years old children using two scales. A list of children from 14 schools in Gautam Budh Nagar district (U.P.) was collected and 1025 children were randomly selected. The children were asked about how they feel when they visit a dentist, by VPT and FIS separately their role with gender, age and socioeconomic was evaluated. Aim: To do comparative evaluation of role of gender, age and socioeconomic status on perceived dental anxiety of 4 to 8 years old children using two scales. Results: Among 1025 children, 532(51.9%) were males and 493 (48.1%) were females. Age wise comparison of both scales score revealed that mean FIS score was statistically significant and higher than mean VPT scale among 7 and 8 year age groups. Among 4, 5 and 6 year age group, no statistically significant difference was found between two scales. Conclusion: Dental anxiety is found to increase with increasing age. Females had a similar level of anxiety as compared to males and Children from low SES had a high level of dental anxiety than children from high SES.

Do Subjects from Different Occupational Groups Experience Dental Fear and Anxiety Equally?

“…Likewise, many papers have emphasized a positive relation between different socioeconomic status and dental fear. A higher socioeconomic status can be linked to less dental fear or dental anxiety, as opposed to individuals who have poor socioeconomic status [15,24,29,30]. This trend can be attributed to level of education since individuals with more years of education are usually at higher socioeconomic levels [31].…”