Swedish dental journal. Supplement
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Temporomandibular disorders (TMD) with orofacial pain with or without reduced jaw function, are frequent conditions in the general population. Different factors such as tooth clenching and grinding, sometimes due to enhanced psychosocial stress, and trauma to the jaws may be important as etiologic factors. Signs and symptoms of TMD are a common cause for general practitioners to use different intraoral appliances as pain and bite-force reducing devices and for improvement of a reduced jaw function. ⋯ In article IV the long-term efficacy was evaluated of the resilient appliance compared to the non-occluding control appliance in the TMD pain patients. Appliance wear was also studied in this article. As in the short-term follow-up, there was no statistically significant difference between the resilient appliance and the non-occluding control appliance in reducing TMD pain in the long-term perspective.
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Diagnostic radiology has undergone profound changes in the last 30 years. New technologies are available to the dental field, cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) as one of the most important. CBCT is a catch-all term for a technology comprising a variety of machines differing in many respects: patient positioning, volume size (FOV), radiation quality, image capturing and reconstruction, image resolution and radiation dose. ⋯ The CTDI method is not applicable estimating effective dose for these units. Based on DAP values effective dose varied between 11-77 microSv (ICRP 60, 1991) in a retrospectively selected patient material. Adaptation of exposure parameters to diagnostic task can give substantial dose reduction.
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Among researchers and in the general population, awareness of the impact of health and health care on the quality of human life is increasing. An important medical and dental research area that addresses this issue is health measurement scales and psychometrics. Such instruments have numerous uses, such as to screen psychosocial aspects in individual patient care, assess perceived health or disease in population surveys, measure outcome in clinical trials, and gather data for cost-utility analyses. ⋯ There was a significant difference in OAS for age, gender, self-reported oral health, and self-reported general health status groups. Subjects who reported extreme satisfaction (item score of 10) varied between 17% for "color of the teeth" and 30% for "appearance of face" and "profile". The OHIP, JFLS, and OAS are considered well suited for use in research and as clinical outcome measures in patients with functional and aesthetic concerns, such as prosthodontic patients.