Introduction: Anxiety towards exodontic procedures is a common occurrence in dental practice. In hypertensive patients this anxiety induced stress may have an effect on cardiovascular system which may be clinically significant.
Aim: To evaluate the cardiovascular changes in hypertensive patients that may manifest following anxiety induced stress in patients undergoing exodontic procedures under local anaesthesia.
Materials and methods: Eighty known hypertensive patients under medication reporting to Department of Oral and Maxillofacial surgery, Dayananda Sagar College of Dental Sciences Bangalore, Karnataka, India for extraction of teeth were taken up for the study. Anxiety was measured before local anaesthetic delivery using Amsterdam Pre-operative Anxiety and Information Scale (APAIS). Cardiovascular response data including blood pressure, heart rate, pulse rate, oxygen saturation and electrocardiographic changes were measured pre-operatively, immediately after local anaesthesia administration and Post-operatively at five, ten and fifteen minutes interval. Kruskal-Wallis test was used to compare continuous variables before and after the injection of local anaesthesia including heart rate, pulse rate, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure. Repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyse the significance of changes in heart rate, pulse rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation over time between groups.Chi-square test was used to analyse the significance of electrocardiographic changes.
Results: The results revealed that the mean anxiety score before administration of local anaesthetic was 9.91(S.D ±2.9) with a range 4-20. Severe preoperative anxiety (<12) was associated with significantly increased heart rate, pulse rate, systolic blood pressure. At the pre-injection phase the mean values were systolic blood pressure (130.72±9.2), diastolic blood pressure (81.6±7.7), heart rate (72.7±11.9) and oxygen saturation (95.2±1.9). These values were increased immediately after local anaesthetic delivery and this relation was statistically significant for all parameters except oxygen saturation. Electrocardiographic abnormalities were found before and after injection of local anaesthetic (p>0.001). One patient showed right bundle branch block pattern.
Conclusion: Dental anxiety impacts the effects of delivery of local anaesthesia on blood pressure, heart rate, pulse rate and electrocardiograph and is significantly associated with the increase in systolic blood pressure, heart rate, pulse rate and changes in electrocardiograph. Thus, present study supported that increased anxiety in hypertensive patients who underwent extraction is associated with cardiovascular changes.
Keywords: Blood pressure; Electrocardiogram; Heart rate; Oxygen saturation.