Anxiety Control and Periodontal Practice

Chronic periodontitis is one of the most common diseases in clinical dentistry, which requires various surgical interventions to treat the moderately to severely destructed supporting periodontium. Most patients have anxiety and fear to those surgical procedures and dentists often have problems dealing with those patients. By applying the conscious sedation technique in outpatient units, periodontists have become able to manage their patients successfully with less anxiety or fear. Also, we have experienced the increased level of patients' satisfaction. Generally, periodontal treatments are time consuming procedures and patients are usually reluctant to the periodontal instruments. This study is focused on the sedation procedure with intravenous midazolam infusion performed in Department of Periodontology of Ewha Womans University Hospital. Using questionnaires, we evaluated 80 randomly selected patients for the anxiolytic effect of intravenous midazolam. Anxiety control using IV sedation was very helpful in performing various periodontal reconstructive and advanced surgical procedures in implant dentistry.