Temporomandibular disorder in elderly

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of temporomandibular disorder (TDM) in a group of elderly people, which was correlated with the number of the patients’ teeth. The sample was constituted by all the patients with 60 years old or more, participants of the Municipal Center of Coexistence of the elderly people (Living together Program) of Campina Grande’s city / Paraíba - Brazil. In all the patients were done anamnesis, oral clinical exam and a simplified anamnetic questionnaire applied - MFD, for diagnosis of TMD´s diagnosis. The dates were collected in the period of June/2004 to June/2005 and submitted to the descriptive analysis and the Chi-Square Test, with level of significance was set to p = 0.05. Of the 137 patients evaluated, 72.3% were women and 27.7% men, with a mean age of 70.4 ± 7.8. The patients were stratified according to age groups: from 60 to 70 years old (56.2%), from 71 to 80 years old (32.1%) and from 81 to 90 years old (11.7%). The TMD was observed in 60% of the patients, which 30.8% with light TMD, 21.9% moderate, 7.3% severe. Edentulism represented 78.3% of the elderly people studied, which 15.2% had from 4 to 10 teeth and 6.5% had from 11 to 19 teeth. There was statistically significant correlation between TMD and the number and intervals of teeth, with p = 0.005 and p = 0.046, respectively. In conclusion, with the obtained results, the elderly people studied presented TMD´s high prevalence, which is correlated with edentulism and the number of the patients’ teeth.