Development of the first Arabic cognitive dental anxiety scale for children and young adults

Core Tip

Core tip: The Abeer children dental anxiety scale (ACDAS) scale is different from existing scales as it is the first dental anxiety scale for children which correlate dental anxiety with cognitive status. It can recognise the stimuli for dental anxiety in a logical order, and has questions concerning the expectation of the child’s legal guardian about the behaviour of the child before the treatment, whether the child has any previous dental treatment experience and the dentist’s rating for the child’s behaviour at the end of the treatment at the same visit. Finally, when assessing the external validity of the binary ACDAS, it was shown that its results compared favourably with those of the main study (κ = 0.79, sensitivity = 96.4%, specificity = 65.9%) when applied to children in a different London school (κ = 0.68, sensitivity = 92.9%, specificity = 73.5%). Therefore, ACDAS was shown to work well in two different locations with different children, which suggests that it is a generalisable scale. Based on the findings of this study, it is proposed that the ACDAS encompasses the required criteria for the gold standard dental anxiety scale for children.