Stress Level Among Dentists In Performing Treatment In Clinic, Deep Sedation, and General Anesthesia

Occupational stress, defined as when the resources of the individual are not sufficient to cope with the needs of a situation, is a leading modern health and safety challenge 2.

Although stress is defined as a feeling of tension and pressure, small amounts of stress can be helpful for the individual to cope with difficult situations. The dentist who wants to provide the best treatment for the patient can feel stress and uneasiness when the current conditions are inappropriate. If this stress of dentist is very the desired amount, it can lead to harmful results for patient health.

Especially in pediatric dentistry, behaviour management problems in children, parents' expectations, and behaviours can be more stressful and exhausting in practice. A dentist' s fear and anxiety in children can create various difficulties for the child, parents, dentists, and their team.

Deep sedation is the method in which consciousness is suppressed in a controlled manner by the drug applied, partial loss of protective reflexes, and the response to verbal stimuli is removed. General anaesthesia, on the other hand, is a condition in which the level of patient unconsciousness can be controlled, the patient's protective reflexes are partially or wholly lost, he cannot protect the airway independently, and cannot respond to verbal commands or physical stimuli. Ensuring and maintaining airway patency is vital in sedation applications. In anaesthesia applications, deep sedation in dental procedures is challenging due to the anatomical proximity of the surgical area to the airway, the risk of microaspiration. Dental treatment with general anaesthesia is seen that it is a stressful situation for the practitioner since some complications such as neurological damage, cardiac and respiratory arrest, and even death may occur.

In healthy individuals, stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system at the beginning of the stress response begins with the secretion of epinephrine and norepinephrine from the adrenal medulla. For this reason, sympathetic activity is measured by various evaluation methods such as heart rate, blood pressure, O2 saturation. Salivary cortisol has been accepted as a reliable biomarker of the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal system as a delayed stress response.