Levels of Anxiety in Patients Undergoing Simple Tooth Extraction: The Possible Contributing Factors.

Aims: The current study aims to assess the levels of patients’ anxiety towards simple tooth extraction, and the difference in pre-extraction anxiety levels; if present; between genders and among different age groups. Materials and Methods: Two hundred and ninety-two patients who presented for simple tooth extraction were recruited. Each participant filled a self-administrated questionnaire; the tooth-extraction anxiety (TEA) scale and asked to rate the amount of their anxiety toward tooth extraction on 11- point Numeric Rating Scale (NRS). Results: Two hundred and sixty-three patients (90.07%) filled-out the questionnaire completely. Cronbach’s α for the present sample was 0.84 correlated significantly with NRS (0.48, P<0.01). Anxiety among patients was moderate, and mean scores of 4.68 and 2.76 were recorded on NRS and TEA scale respectively. The scores of anxiety in female patients was slightly higher than in male patients but without statistical significance. When considering the age groups of participants, significantly higher anxiety was depicted in the young and old adult age groups than in middle-age adult group of patients. Conclusions : Anxiety may be more predicted in female, young, and old-adult patients .