Papers of the Week

Accumulating evidence has revealed that dental anxiety is robustly associated with dental care-related pain and discomfort, but also with the personality trait of neuroticism (i.e. the relatively stable disposition to experience the world as distressing, threatening and unsafe). However, there is a near absence of research on these risk factors in samples for which genetic information is available. With the aim of arriving at a more refined understanding of dental anxiety, this twin cohort study assessed genetic and environmental influences on neuroticism, dental care-related pain and dental anxiety, and the relation between these phenotypes.