VALIDITY OF A BRIEF QUESTIONNAIRE IN SCREENING ASYMPTOMATIC SUBJECTS FROM SUBJECTS WITH TENSION-TYPE HEADACHES OR TEMPOROMANDIBULAR DISORDERS

Clinical investigations of temporomandibular disorders require objecti ve, repeatable methods for screening diseased subjects from non-diseas ed control subjects. This study evaluated whether information gathered from a short. public domain questionnaire was useful in distinguishin g temporomandibular disorder subjects (n = 216) from non-temporomandib ular disorder controls (n = 69) and tension-type headache subjects (n = 22). The questionnaire consisted of eight questions relating to jaw pain (i.e., location of pain, precipitating factors, and temporal patt ern of pain) and five questions relating to jaw function (i.e., joint noises, locking, and difficulty in opening). There were five possible answers to each question which ranged from 0 (no symptoms) to 4 (unbea rable or constant symptoms). The total scores for the eight pain quest ions and the five jaw function questions were used to determine the qu estionnaire's sensitivity and specificity in each group, and ROC curve s were plotted to identify the best cutoff point for disease presence or absence. Results showed that the questionnaire reliably distinguish ed between the control group and temporomandibular disorder group with 90.3%-97.7% sensitivity and 95.7%-100% specificity at cutoff values b etween 5 and 9. These results support the use of the questionnaire as a primary screening tool for general practice and as a supplementary s creening tool for clinical temporomandibular disorder studies. However , results also showed that the questionnaire was unable to distinguish easily between TMD subjects and temporalis region tension-type headac he subjects.