Dental fears among the students of University of Jordan

الملخص EN

Objectives: -The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of dental anxiety and/or dental phobia.

Also, the study has tried to identify the psychological etiology of dental anxiety as perceived by Jordanian students Methodology: - The study population consisted of 425 students from Jordan University who participated in this study (121 males and 304 females) mean age 22 years.

The participants were selected from six different colleges excluding dental college.

To fulfill the purpose of this study data were collected using the Arabic version of Dental Anxiety Inventory (DAI), which was developed originally, by Marlies and colleagues (5).

The authors added two open questions related to etiology and visiting dentists Results: - The results provide evidence that the Arabic Version of DA has good reliability and validity.

The results of the study revealed that half the study group did not suffer from dental anxiety (49.17%) while 27.5 % students suffered mild dental anxiety.

20.9% students suffered moderate DA and only 2.3% suffered severe dental phobia.

Dental anxiety found to be more prevalence and severe among females than males P<.001.

Also, results indicated that 44% of the students attributed the cause of dental anxiety to aversive experiences during childhood (dental care associated with pain) 15% of students developed the symptoms through negative experiences by one of the parents or older siblings.

Conclusion: This study showed that the prevalence and severity of dental anxiety are higher than the previous studies found.

The study addresses some recommendations in order to prevent and manage dental anxiety and phobia.

Dental anxiety ,(DA) is a common and distressing problem among individuals of varying ages and sexes.

It was found that dental anxiety has negative impact on the dentist-patient relationship.

Phobic patients avoid dentist’s visits, which leads to advanced oral pathology and eventually loss of teeth1.