Neuroscientists Reveal The Real Reason You Feel Nervous At The Dentist’s
Most of us are familiar with butterflies in the tummy and a racing heartbeat when faced with a wait outside the treatment room at the dental practice and researchers from Japan have revealed the reason why so many of us feel anxious in the waiting room.
Neuroscientists in Japan have been studying brain activity in response to common dental sounds, such as the dental drill and suction instruments and the team believes that they are a step closer to answering the question of why people feel so anxious when they are faced with the sights and sounds of the dental surgery.
Hiroyuki Karibe, from Nippon Dental University in Tokyo, said that discovering how the brain works in anxious patients could help researchers to analyse ways of making them feel more comfortable. Karibe, a paediatric dentist since 1987, added that he is aware that the sound of the drill is sufficient to make many patients feel nervous, but nobody has ever actually investigated the effect of the noises on brain activity.
Karibe worked with psychologists on the study, which involved 21 women and 13 men aged between 19 and 49 years old; the participants were asked to complete a questionnaire to measure how much anxiety they experienced when going to the dentist. Karibe then divided the group based on the severity of their anxiety and scanned the brain using an fMRI scanner while playing out typical dental sounds, including suction tools and the whirring of the dreaded drill.
In response to the noises, the low risk group displayed signs of increased brain activity in the primary auditory areas of the brain, while the high risk group experienced heightened activity in a different region of the brain, known as the left caudate nucleus.
Karibe said that the findings of the study, which were presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, could be used to evaluate the efficacy of therapies and treatments, which may be beneficial for sufferers of dental anxiety.
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