[The evaluation of sound level in dental practice].

Noise pollution is one of the most important problems of the contemporary world. Dentistry is one of the most affected areas because the activity in a dental practice involves the use of different devices that generate noise. The purpose of our study is to evaluate the sound level in a dental practice with 4 dental units using a complex system, which comprises: a Sound Blaster Live 5.1, a Dual microphone, a PC and special software for the acquisition and data analysis. The sound level detected by us is similar with the data from the international literature with some particular aspects and suggests that the dental practice is a noise polluted environment although most of the sound levels are beneath the damaging noise level for the human ear (85 dB).