RESEARCH ARTICLE
Dental Fear: One Single Clinical Question for Measurement
S. Jaakkola1, 2, *, P. Rautava2, 3, P. Alanen4, M Aromaa2, 5, K Pienihäkkinen4, H. Räihä6, T. Vahlberg7, M.-L. Mattila11, 2, M. Sillanpää2, 8
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 3
First Page: 161
Last Page: 166
Publisher ID: TODENTJ-3-161
DOI: 10.2174/1874210600903010161
Article History:
Received Date: 30/4/2008Revision Received Date: 23/12/2008
Acceptance Date: 3/6/2009
Electronic publication date: 28/7/2009
Collection year: 2009

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
A new dental fear measurement instrument, the Short Dental Fear Question (SDFQ), was developed and tested for clinical practice purposes. The correlations of the SDFQ with the Dental Anxiety Scale (DAS) and the Dental Fear Survey (DFS) were tested in 15-16-year-old adolescents. The Spearman correlations (rs) between the dental fear measurement instruments were: SDFQ – DFS: rs = 0.79, n = 26; DFS – DAS: rs = 0.72, n = 26; SDFQ– DAS: rs = 0.69, n = 27. DAS and DFS mean scores were clearly higher in the SDFQ fear group than SDFQ in the relaxed group. The SDFQ is a short and compact instrument which might be convenient for the measurement of dental fear in clinical practice.