Abstract
Many patients have such feelings as anxiety, fear or strain toward dental treatments, which increase sympathetic nerve activity further breeded somatic anxiety like palpitation, tremor or sweating. Some dentists can not treat these patients. Therefore, diminishing these negative conditions is important to dental treatments and they usually give antianxietic drugs to their patients. On the other hand, for suppressing the patients' anxiety, a few dentists often use Autogenic Training (AT). Indicating plasma catecholamine, we investigated suppressive effects of AT and antianxietic drugs for the sympathetic nerve activity toward dental procedure. Subjectes consisted of 30 makes with ages ranging from 23 to 28. 11 males in the AT group, 9 males in the antianxietic drug group and 10 males in the control group.Lying on dental chairs, they were injected saline as pain stimulation as a dental procedure model in oral mucosa. For measuring plasma catecholamine, their blood samples were collected at ordinary times, before and after injection out of their subsking vein of arms.Result : Mean plasma adrenaline in the AT group before injection (0.025 ng/ml) was lower than the control group (0.032 ng/ml), and higher than the antianxietic drug group (0.017 ng/ml), and after injection (0.017 ng/ml) was lower than the control group (0.028 ng./ml) and the same as the antianxietic drug group. Mean plasma nordrenaline in AT group before injection (0.19 ng/ml) was lower than the control group (0.250 ng/ml) and higher than the antianxietic drug group (0.143 ng/ml), after injection (0.143 ng/ml) was lower than the control group (0.276 ng/ml) and the antianxietic drug group (0.161 ng/ml).These results suggest that increased sympathetic nerve activity due to dental procedure can be suppressed by practicing AT.
