“Dente fantasma”: avaliação do conhecimento de Cirurgiões-Dentistas e acadêmicos de Odontologia sobre odontalgia atípica

Abstract

Pain is an unpleaseant sensitive experience that could be present in different ways in each individual when he or she is submitted to a painful stimulus. Its diagnosis is easier when a signo or symptom is identified as a causal agent, however, we can emphasize the presence of atypical pain, where is necessary a more criterious investigation to accurated diagnosis. Pain in a “phantom limb” is commonly found in patients which had traumatic amputations of limbs and it is characterized by sensitive manifestations in the absent limb. Atypical odontalgya presents similar symptons, but it is observed in the oral cavity as a consequence of odontological procedures, mainly pulpectomy and exodontia. It’s was perfomed an observational, sectional, and descriptive study based in a written auto-response questionnaire, whose aim was to evaluate the knowledge of atypical odontalgya. It was evaluated 75 dentists and 49 students that were in the final year of Odontology course, in the period between June 2017 and February 2018. We observed that the majority of subjects (87%) recognized the possibility of atypical odontalgya in oral cavity, however, few of them knew factors that are directly related to its ocurrence, such as deafferentation (7%) and amputation neuroma (16%). Also, it was observed that none of subjects could give information about odontological procedures which can trigger atypical pain. It can be concluded that the participants have few knowledge related to atypical odontalgya aspects, specially the students, what indicates the necessity of greater divulgation about this theme in universities.