Symptomatic Tendency of Temporomandibular Joint Disorders after Whiplash Injury

ABSTRACT

TM joint disorder resulting from whiplash injury by a traffic accident is usually diagnosed depending on patient's subjective symptom complaints. It is difficult to treat the patient without any consideration for his intentional secondary gain because of the compensation related with the traffic accident. With the prospective study of the symptom and the result of the treatment for the patients who complained TM joint disorder symptoms among 142 admitted patients diagnosed as whiplash injury in our hospital. Clinical follow up was available on 67 patients with TM joint disorder symptom complaints of total 142 patients diagnosed as acute whiplash injury in our hospital from Sep. 1, 1999 to march. 31, 2001.the follow up period was an average of 9.8 months(range from 7 months to 19 months). We treated them by means of soft diet, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent, muscle relaxants, and physical therapy. As the result of this study, we found that the most of TM joint disorder symptoms occurred in 2-3 days(an average of 2.73 days) after whiplash injury and the symptom continued an average of 19.3 days and disappeared completely in about 3 months. The purpose of this article is to understand the relationship between these entities of disease and the psychologic factor and to analayze the tendency of the symptoms. in our study, we reached the conclusion that it is more reasonable to regard them as disease related with not psychological factor but organic factor.