Identifying undiagnosed rheumatic disorders among patients with TMD.

If a patient with TMD has a coexisting rheumatic disorder, it may adversely affect the TMD symptoms and treatment outcome. A clinic that specializes in TMD treatment asked symptom-related questions of 104 patients with TMD, and a rheumatology clinic then performed rheumatologic evaluations. The authors review the results of the rheumatologic evaluations and the predictive probability for the questions. The findings of this study suggest questions that practitioners can ask to help identify patients with TMD who have a high probability of being diagnosed with a coexisting rheumatic disorder.