The autonomic nervous mechanism of music therapy for dental anxiety

This paper explored the influence of music on dental anxiety during the ultrasonic scaling. Twenty-six patients having dental anxiety during scaling treatment were randomly allocated to either an experimental group (with background music during ultrasonic scaling) or a control group (without background music during ultrasonic scaling), and their Electrocardiogram (ECG) data were obtained. Statistic test showed that six ECG features had significant difference between the experimental group and the controlled group. These six ECG features were further applied to distinguish the ECG data of the experimental group from those of the controlled group. A SVM classifier achieved the 92.3% accuracy for the above-mentioned binary classification in a leave-one-out cross validation process. The result revealed that music intervention restrained the activity of sympathetic nerve system and enhanced the activity of parasympathetic nerve system.