Dentistry May Not Be As Painful As Recalled > Back To Resources

Diane Chun - New York Times Syndicate - April 8, 2004

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Are you one of the 25 million Americans who would rather be anywhere than in a dentist's chair?

In a perfect world, a visit to the dentist would be free of pain and stress. Now a new study from researchers in the University of Florida's College of Dentistry reveals that the pain you remember from your last dental visit might be mostly in your head.

It turns out that your memory of pain intensity, recalled months later, may have more to do with how emotionally stressed you were at the time than how painful your experience may have been.

"Clearly, many dental and medical procedures are aversive and anxiety-provoking, fear-provoking and uncomfortable in general," said Jeff Gedney, a pain behavior research fellow in the division of public health services and research.

"What we found was that emotional factors became a better predictor over time of what people would recall than their level of pain during their experience," Gedney reported.

In the study, published in this month's Journal of Pain, researchers found that subjects who were stressed during their painful experience recalled more pain after several months than they reported immediately afterward.

Women also remembered more pain than men, they reported.

No actual visits to the dentist were involved in the study. Instead, 52 men and 48 women were asked to take part in two 15-minute experimental sessions.

In the high-stress session, they were asked to speak extemporaneously on a difficult social issue before a live audience and be videotaped doing it. The low-stress session involved reading magazines about gardening or travel.

Stress levels were assessed by sampling for stress hormones in the subjects' saliva and monitoring their heart rates.

After both sessions, the participants completed a pain task -- holding a bag of crushed ice against their forehead for two minutes and then rating the pain. Another series of questions tested for emotional pain.

When 68 of the volunteers were contacted six months later for a follow-up survey, nearly everyone recalled more pain than they reported at the time of the experience, according to study co-investigator Henrietta Logan.

More study is needed to explain the gender difference in pain recall, the investigators say.

Logan said dentists and other health care providers need to address their patients' emotional comfort as well as their physical ailments, making their experience as positive as possible.

"If not, it's bound to make a difference not only in a patient's willingness to come back but also in their long-term recall of the amount of pain they experienced," she said.

(Diane Chun writes for The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun.) Editor Notes: NONE

c.2004 NYT Regional Newspapers

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