Dental Treatment as Perceived Etiology of Temporomandibular Disorders

Objectives: To investigate the TMD patients’ self-understanding of etiologies and characterize patients who believe that their TMD symptoms are caused by their prior dental treatment.
Methods: A sample of 337 patient medical records from the Department of Masticatory Science, Faculty of Dentistry, Mahidol University were extracted for their self-understanding of TMD etiologies and then classified into dental treatment related and non-dental treatment related groups. The following analysis was to identify the relationship between patient perception’s etiologies and patient characterization (age ,sex ,education ,occupation ,TMD symptoms) using logistic regression and t-test. The level of statistical significant was set at 0.05.
Results: There are 131 patients who perceive that the causes of their TMD were dental related issues, 27.5% of this group mentioned that their TMD caused by priuor dental treatment. Patient reporting dental treatment caused their TMDs was significantly related to disability (self-reported work disability (OR=2.240, 95%CI=1.006-4.987), family interference (OR=3.107, 95%CI=1.067-9.045), and depression (OR=4.778, 95%CI=1.801-12.674)).
Conclusions: Dentist should realize that their dental treatments could possibly be the cause of patients’ TMD symptoms according to patients’ belief, and characterization of TMD patients with previous dental treatment related cause is greater pain severity, and high frequent reports disability