[Preoperative anxiety assessed by questionnaires and patient declarations]

The perioperative period can be anxiety-provoking for any patient scheduled for surgery. The anxiety can be divided into three categories: physiological, psychological and behavioural. For objective assessment, special questionnaires have been used, yet since they are too complicated for everyday use, simpler methods have been proposed. We have compared three measurements of anxiety to determine their equivalence in assessing anxiety before surgery: the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and patient declaration in the form of an answer to a single question.

Thirty-eight ASA I and II adult patients, of both sexes, aged 18-60 years, and scheduled for elective abdominal or ENT surgery, were enrolled into the study. All patients were interviewed one day before the procedure and were asked to complete the STAI questionnaire, rate their fear on the VAS, and answer the question: "Are you afraid of anything?" The Kolmogorow-Smirnov test, t-Student test and r-Pearson correlation test were used for statistical analysis.

Sixty six per cent of the questioned patients expressed a feeling of fear and their mean STAI-T (traid) score was 42.9 +/- 7.9, STAI-S (scale) 44.6 +/- 10.5. The VAS score was 3.7 +/- 2.6. Among those who did not declare a feeling of fear, the scores were: STAI-T: 36.9 +/- 8.2, STAI-S: 41.0 +/- 6.3, and VAS: 1.5 +/- 1.7. Females expressed a feeling of fear more often than males (p=0.03). There were no statistically significant differences related to age, the type of scheduled surgery or ASA score. The results obtained by all methods were closely correlated.

We conclude that, since the results of anxiety measurement were comparable in all tests, a simple question or the VAS scale should be sufficient for proper assessment of preoperative anxiety.