Dental Pain Memory May Be 'All in Your Head'

FRIDAY, April 9 (HealthDayNews) -- How much pain you remember from your last visit to the dentist may not have been all in your teeth. A lot of it may have been in your head.

A University of Florida (UF) College of Dentistry study says that a person's memory of pain's intensity months after they experienced it may be influenced more by how stressed the person was during the experience than by the actual level of pain.

The study included 52 men and 48 women who underwent two 15-minute experimental sessions -- one stress-free and one stressful. Here's how the researchers created stress: The study participants had to give speeches about difficult social issues to a live audience and in front of a video camera. In the stress-free setting, the participants read magazines about gardening or travel.

Researchers assessed the participants' stress levels during both sessions.

After each session, participants were asked to rate the severity of pain of an "ice-cream headache" caused by holding a bag of crushed ice against their foreheads. Six months later, the researchers interviewed 68 participants about their pain memories.

"We found that nearly everyone recalled more pain at six months than they reported at the time of their experience," researcher Henrietta L. Logan, director of public health services at UF College of Dentistry, said in a prepared statement.

"Women tended to recall more pain, and moreover, people in the stress condition recalled more pain than people from the non-stress condition," Logan said.

People from the stress session recalled nearly 10 percent more pain than those from the non-stress session. The emotional state of the participants at the time of the six-month follow-up interview also influenced their memory of pain intensity.

"Clearly, many dental and medical procedures are aversive and anxiety-provoking, fear-provoking and uncomfortable in general. What we found was that emotional factors became a better predictor over time of what people would recall than was their level of pain during their experience," researcher Jeffrey J. Gedney, a pain behavior research fellow at UF College of Dentistry, said in a prepared statement.

The study was published in the Journal of Pain.

More information
The American Dental Association has information about dental anxiety at http://www.ada.org/public/topics/anxiety.asp.


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