Dental Fear in Children With Repeated Tooth Injuries

Abstract

SUMMARY -Tooth injuries are serious clinical conditions. Some children experience dental trauma only once, while others are more prone to repeated tooth injuries. Repeated dental trauma occurs in 19.4% to 30% of patients. Pain and dental trauma are the most common reasons for fear and anxiety. Th e main objective of this study was to investigate how dental trauma, as well as repeated dental trauma aff ects the occurrence and development of dental fear in children. Th e study was conducted on a random sample of 147 subjects (88 boys and 59 girls) aged 5-8 and 9-12 years. Subjects in both age groups were divided into subroups without dental trauma, with one dental trauma and with repeated dental trauma. Th e validated Children's Fear Survey Schedule -Dental Subscale was used on fear assessment. Results showed that only 12.2% of children without trauma, 33.3% with one trauma and 51.7% with repeated trauma were not afraid of injection. Older children had a significantly lower fear of injections, touch of an unknown person, choking, going to the hospital and people in white uniforms. Dentist was not the cause of fear in 65.5% of patients with repeated trauma. With each repeated injury of teeth, the degree of their fear of dental treatment was lower.

Possible Risk Factors for Dental Fear and Anxiety in Children Who Suffered Traumatic Dental Injury

“…The manner in which children are taught to adapt to stressful situations is determined by the individual’s mental characteristics, their level of intellectual development, and the impact of the environment and other people. This supports the idea that cognitive processes and time factors influence fear perception [ 46 ]. One of the study’s limitations is that the sample was drawn from a single medical institution.…”

“…In our study, the proportion of highly anxious children varied from 14.55 to 17.72% regarding the cutoff point (38 or 45), which appears to be a slightly higher proportion than in the general population. However, Negovetić Vranić et al [ 46 ] showed that patients with multiple traumas have a somewhat lower proportion of high anxiety than the general population, potentially due to adaptation to different situations. To our knowledge, this is the first research that attempted to evaluate possible risks such as age, gender, place of residence, child’s sports activity, parents’ knowledge, type of TDI, presence/absence of soft-tissue injury, experiencing pain in the last three months, number of subjective complaints, and oral hygiene status determined via OHI-S in a multifactorial model of dental fear and anxiety (DFA) in children who suffered TDI.…”