The effect of accompany person to level of anxiety on tooth extraction patients using blood pressure, pulse rate, and dental anxiety scale

Background: Tooth extraction is a common activity in dental practice. Anxiety is the initial challenge that immediately seen on the patient. Many factors affect patient anxiety, such as dental tools, room atmosphere, nurse and dentist, or the most important, the tooth extraction procedure itself. Anxiety can cause a significant delay in procedure while waiting for patient to be ready to be extracted. Social support is believed to minimize patient’s anxiety during tooth extraction procedure. Accompany person may provide sufficient social support to the patient, yet conflicting studies results questioned its necessity to overcome patient’s anxiety. Objective: This paper aims to evaluate the effect of the accompanying person on the patient’s anxiety level during tooth extraction. Methods: The study was done using a cross sectional observational analytic design. Subjects were collected using accidental sampling at Dental Clinic Panti Swasti Tangeb Bali for the last one year. Data from 103 subjects who divided into two groups, 56 subjects for the accompany group (APG) and 47 subjects for the non-accompany group (NAPG), were analyzed. Level of anxiety was assessed based on blood pressure, pulse rate, and Dental Anxiety Scale (DAS) score. Results: The result showed that on APG, systolic and diastolic blood pressures were lower than the NAPG group, systolic of 113.3 ± 6.1 mmHg and diastolic of 77.7 ± 5 mmHg compared to systolic of 119.4 ± 4 mmHg and diastolic of 78.9 ± 3.4 mmHg. Pulse rate was also lower in the APG group, 82.2 ± 7.6 bpm vs. 91.6 ± 5.4 bpm, respectively. The DAS score was 12.6 ± 1.7 in the APG and 14.3 ± 1.5 in the NAPG. The overall anxiety level based on systolic blood pressure, pulse rate, and DAS score were significantly lower in the APG compared to the NAPG (p<0.05). Conclusion: Accompanying person provided less anxiety to the patients undergoing tooth extraction procedure.