Validation of the Italian Version of the Modified Dental Anxiety Scale (MDAS)

Introduction. The management of dentally anxious patients represents a clinical challenge for the dental practitioner. Many scales have been proposed to assess dental anxiety. Among these, the MDAS showed high reliability and validity. Aim of this work was to test the validity of the italian version of MADS. Materials and Methods. The original version of MDAS was translated into Italian and then retranslated back to English by bilingual researcher. The MDAS was administered to adult patients referred to the Dental Clinic of the University of Ferrara. To test the validity of MDAS, each patient was asked to fill out also the Italian 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) to assess alexithymia, the Italian Cognitive Behavioral Assessment Forma Hospital (CBA-H) to assess general medical fears, the Italian SF-12 Health Survey to assess the general quality of life. Local Ethical Committee approved the study and each patient provided written informed consent. Correlation and stepwise regression analyses were performed. Results. 25 patients (5 males, 20 females, age 44.3±14.5) gave their consent to participate to this study. The MDAS score was found to be correlated to CBA-H A1 (p