When a stimulus is applied to one part of the body, pain sometimes occurs in a distant site. This distant pain is called referred pain. The aims of this project were: To describe the prevalence of referred pain in subjects with temporomandibular disorders (TMD) at baseline and 8-year follow-up and the prevalence of persistence of referred pain at follow-up. Another aim was to identify risk factors for having referred pain at baseline and for predicting its persistence at follow-up. Finally, we wanted to determine whether referred pain affects the prognosis of patients with a TMD diagnosis. For each objective, we explored demographics such as gender, age, income, education level, and race. Other factors investigated included facial pain duration, somatization, somatization without pain, depression, anxiety, characteristic pain intensity (CPI), graded chronic pain scale (GCPS), number of other pains (headache, chest, back or stomach), and TMD diagnosis (myofascial pain, disk displacement, arthralgia or degenerative joint disease DJD). Methods: This secondary analysis included the data sets from the Research Diagnostic Criteria for Temporomandibular Disorders (RDC/TMD) Validation (baseline) and IMPACT (follow-up) studies. It focused on a subclassification pain diagnosis termed "myofascial pain with referral". Subjects included in our analysis were TMD cases at baseline (n = 614) and TMD cases at follow-up (n = 286). Results. 26.4% of TMD cases had pain with referral at baseline and 36.4% at follow-up. The sites most likely to refer pain were extraoral sites (temporalis, masseter and mandible) at both baseline and follow-up. Female gender was associated with a higher
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