Background: Surgical removal of impacted mandibular third molar is a common procedure in oral and maxillofacial surgery and is associated with preoperative
dental anxiety. Preoperative dental anxiety is interrelated with increase duration of third molar surgery especially among the Caucasians. Materials and methods: This is a Cohort Study involving 89 consecutive consenting adult patients requiring impacted mandibular third molars surgery at the OMS clinic of UNTH Enugu. Surgery was done under local anaesthesia after completing modified
dental anxiety scale (MDAS) questionnaire. Pederson difficulty index scale was filled prior to surgery, while modified Parant scale was filled after the surgery by the researcher for each participant. The duration of surgery was timed from the beginning of the first incision to the insertion of the last suture by a trained dental surgery assistant (DSA) using a quartz multifunction clock. The data collected was stored and analysed using IBM SPSS version 22. Results and discussion: 47 participants were females while 42 were males. Their age range was between 18 years and 30 years, with a mean age of 25.8 ± 4.0 years. The association between pre-operative dental anxiety and duration of third molar surgery was insignificant, p= 0.59. Difficulty of extraction using Pederson index and Modified Parent scale had a significant influence on the duration of third molar surgery. Conclusions: Duration of third molar surgery may not be significantly influenced by patient’s level of dental anxiety in sub-Saharan
Africans, while the difficulty index of the impacted third molar had a significant influence on surgery duration.
- dental anxiety
- difficulty index.
- preoperative stage
- surgery duration