Udbredelse og opfattelse af angst for tandbehandling blandt voksne danskere.[Prevalence and perceptions of dental anxiety among Danish adults.]:Moore R, Birn H, Brødsgaard I, Kirkegaard E, Scheutz F

English summary: This telephone survey showed that 4.2% of Danish adults over 16 years old have extreme dental anxiety and 6% have moderate fear in a sample of 565 adults from Århus (Table 1). Common perceptions as to the causes of dental fear indicated that most believed it to be due to pain, especially from drilling and thereafter trauma or negative experiences leading to distrust of the dentist (Table 1). It was interesting to note that although up to 40% of the sample expressed some degree of fear for dentistry, 81.1% said that they know of at least two persons who have dental fear (16.2% know of over ten persons). The most common ways that people have been informed about dental anxiety as a problem is from other non-medical persons (56.6%), then in order: newspapers/magazines (32.7%), TV (14.2%), radio (5.8%), dentists (4.1%) and other medical personnel (2.8%). Characteristics of dental anxiety by the Dental Anxiety Scale (DAS) indicated significant associations between high dental anxiety and gender (women) (Table 2) and low education (Table 3), but not income or age (Table 2). Other significant relationships with high dental fear were fear of specific dental procedures, negative dentist behaviors, general fear and avoidance of dental visits (Table 4). A logististic regression model (Table 5) indicated a difference between extreme (phobic) dental anxiety and moderate dental anxiety in the relative strength of the independent variables, especially for negative dentist behaviors, general fear tendency and women. It was recommended that interested general dentists learn to recognize these differences clinically and that they use the DAS (ref.nr. 11) and Geer Fear Scale (ref.nr. 17) in clinical diagnosis of dental anxiety.