One in five adults suffers from dental anxiety or phobia in Sweden
In Sweden, approximately one in five adults suffers from dental anxiety or phobia. The number has decreased over time, but still, an important part of the population has major problems, according to a recent doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg.
The thesis includes a nationwide interview study involving 3,500 adult individuals, randomly selected from the general population of Sweden. Nineteen percent of the participants reported some degree of dental anxiety, fear, or phobia.
The results showed that 4.7% of the respondents described their dental anxiety as severe, 4.5% as moderate, and 9.8% as low. The remaining 80.9% reported no dental anxiety. The proportion with no dental anxiety was more than twice as high as in a similar study from the 1960s when 38.5% of respondents reported no dental anxiety.