Comparisons of measures that evaluate oral and general health quality of life in patients with temporomandibular disorder and chronic pain

ABSTRACT

Objective: To analyze the oral and general health related quality of life (HRQOL) measures, and to establish their ability to categorize chronic temporomandibular disorders (TMD).

Methods: Data were collected from 104 patients through a questionnaire with detailed socio-demographic information, the Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP-14), the Short-Form-36 (SF-36), the Revised Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R), and the Research Diagnostic Criteria for Temporomandibular Disorders (RDC/TMD) Axis I and II. Descriptive statistics were computed.

Results: Better self-rated health and having no muscle pain were the key predictors for better physical HRQOL, whereas higher levels of depression, worse self-rated health and mandibular functioning were highly associated with worse mental HRQOL. The oral HRQOL were significantly lower in TMD patients with higher pain-related disability and worse oral health rating.

Discussion: The use of the OHIP-14 in chronic TMD patients may provide valuable clinical information for better assessing the pain–related disability when compared to SF-36.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporomandibular disorders
• pain-related impairment
• chronic pain
• psychological impairment
• oral health related quality of life
• health related quality of life

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank all the patients for participating in the study, and Zeynal Karaca for his assistance in editing this manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of financial interest.

Competing interest

The authors declare having no competing financial interest/funding for this paper. AB, KP, and MOK were principal investigators of this study. They contributed to the interpretation of the data and review of the manuscript. AB and KP conceptualized the study, contributed to the interpretation of the data, and wrote the manuscript. MOK participated in study design. AB contributed to the data collection. OU contributed to the study design and data analysis and calculated the post-hoc power analyses for multiple regression models. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

There was no outside funding for this paper.