Children Pain During Dental Treatment

Mareš, Jiří; Hesová, Marie; Skalská, Hana; Hubková, Věra; Chmelařová, Romana

doi:10.14712/18059694.2020.54

Acta Medica > Archive > 1997, Vol. 40 > Issue 4 > Children Pain During Dental Treatment

Acta Med. 1997, 40: 103-108

https://doi.org/10.14712/18059694.2020.54

Children Pain During Dental Treatment

Jiří Mareš^a, Marie Hesová^a, Hana Skalská^b, Věra Hubková^c, Romana Chmelařová^c

^aDepartment of Social Medicine, Charles University, Faculty of Medicine, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
^bDepartment of General Information Science, University of Education, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic
^cDepartment of Dentistry, Charles University, Faculty of Medicine, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic

Received September 1, 1997
Accepted October 1, 1997

This research work was done on the set of 69 children and adolescents 6-14 years old at the children's department of the dental clinic, university hospital in Hradec Králové. We found their expectancy of dental pain inadequate to reality: 67 % children overestimated expected pain, 12 % underestimated it. It does not see that children feelings prior to very performance would signalize in advance how much unpleasant or painful the dental procedure is going to be. We have not found any significant difference in either understanding the instruction or sticking to them, or general cooperation of children. The average time interval of dental procedures fluctuated between 18 and 40 minutes, children were not given any anesthetics (with exception of two cases of extractions) which could be one of the causes of distress. From all the chidren 35 % experienced pain in the dental chair and were able to assess it by VAS and verbally characterize its quality. According to the view of children assessing the subjectively experienced pain intensity there exist two types of dental procedures: the first type being represented by painless but demanding patience procedures, the second group of painful treatment (making fillings or extractions). There were no statistical difference between girls and boys in their experiencing pain but there was some difference between girls and boys as went for an approach of health workers: these much more often tried to support girls.