[Study on factors concerning patients' anxiety in a dental clinic]

To clarify the extent to which patients feel anxious about dental treatment, anonymized data of a self-completed questionnaire obtained at a dental clinic in Saitama Prefecture were used for this study. The subjects were 278 patients older than 15 years of age and who had given informed consent The questionnaire contained 71 questions concerning the following seven characteristic factors: sense of hearing, sense of sight, sense of smell, sense of taste, sense of touch, sense of pain, and other situations. Each question was rated on a four-point scale. Exploratory factor analysis of the 262 answers was performed with the principal factor method and normalized varimax rotation. Six factors were extracted using the Kaiser Criterion and the Screeplot These factors were interpreted as follows: anxiety before treatment, unpleasantness of pain and bleeding, unpleasantness of smell and taste or feeling of the tongue, a sound or appliance that recalled pain, a meaningful sound such as talking by the dentist, and an unpleasant sound from an appliance. The senses of smell, taste and touch in the oral cavity were extracted as the same factor. The sense of hearing was divided into the factor of dissonance and the factor of anxiety recalled by sound in memory. However, no factor concerning the stimulation of sight was extracted. Therefore, the sense of sight might be related with the recognition method of the patient based on past experience and knowledge.