Evaluation of anxiety level in children and adolescents requesting orthodontic treatment

Aim. This study tries to identify the level of anxiety as a state and as a feature in patients that request orthodontic treatment. Methods. The experimental design contains: control group, experimental group. The first lot of subjects, patient lot, is composed by 41 children and adolescents which requested orthodontic treatment. The ages were from 7-18 year old, age average 12,31 standard deviation 2,99. The second lot, control lot, is made of 43 pupils attending a middle school and also a high school in Oradea. The ages were between 9-17 years, age average 12,36 and standard deviation 2,50. The evaluating instruments used were: Stait-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) elaborated by Spielberger in 1983 . Results. The date have been processed using the SPSS-PC 11.0 (program). The analysis between the media for the samples studied has been made using Student t test. Analyzing the values obtained for the variables anxiety as a state for the two samples and comparing their medias, we observe that there are significant statistic differences in the values of anxiety as a state at the two samples at a significant threshold of p<0,01. As for the anxiety as a feature, as expected, we see the absence of any statistical significant differences between the two samples. Conclusions. This research arguments the fact that anxiety generated by the extern factor represented by the orthodontic treatment, must be seen as a complex process that implicates individual significance values, individual effort to dominate and reduce the anxiety generating situations and severe emotional and behavior consequences.