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Evaluation of dental anxiety among children visiting Paediatric Dental Department at Children Hospital.

OBJECTIVE
To determine efficacy of the Urdu version of Dental Subscale of Children's Fear Survey Schedule on children for identifying children with dental anxiety.


METHODS
This cross-sectional study was conducted at the Children's Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan, in November 2015, and comprised child patients who were selected using convenient sampling. Dental Subscale of Children's Fear Survey Schedule was translated into Urdu using forward-backward translation method and administered to subjects aged 4-14 years to evaluate its psychometric properties and set a cut-off score for identifying fearful children. Factor analysis technique evaluated the translated items and analysis of variance explored age-anxiety linkage.


RESULTS
Of the 204 participants, 89(43.6%) were girls and 115(56.4%) were boys. The survey yielded a normal distribution on anxiety scale, with a mean score of 32.13±12.06 and high reliability (a=0.934). Factor analysis indicated 3 factor pattern similar to Western findings. Items about ' choking, drilling sound and open-your-mouth' were mostly feared. Anxiety score declined with age. Setting cut-off score at 70th percentile patients having anxiety score of > 43 were labelled as fearful, and those below as not fearful.


CONCLUSIONS
The scale was deemed valid and reliable tool.