Towards an optimal therapy strategy for myogenous TMD, physiotherapy compared with occlusal splint therapy in an RCT with therapy-and-patient-specific treatment durations

Table 4 Predominant pain intensity from the masticatory system at three stages

Pain intensity per therapy group:
Physiotherapy (n=37)			Splint therapy (n=35)
Initial visit	Start-Tx	LM	Initial visit	Start-Tx	LM
[mean (SD)]			[mean (SD)]
60.4 (22.4)	41.0 (23.4)	19.2 (26.4)	53.6 (13.1)	39.1 (22.5)	11.5 (16.2)
Cohen’s d between stages, per therapy group:
		Physiotherapy		Splint therapy
		d	Confidence interval (95%)	d	Confidence interval (95%)
Initial visit vs start-Tx		0.84	0.36–1.31	0.77	0.29–1.26
Start-Tx vs LM		0.86^a	0.39–1.34	1.39^a	0.87–1.92
Initial visit vs LM		1.66^b	1.13–2.19	2.83^b	2.17–3.49

Top: mean pain intensity in mm on a 100 mm VAS and SD (between brackets) for predominant pain at three stages: initial visit, start of treatment (Start-Tx) and at the last post-treatment visit, last measurement (LM). Both therapy groups have a similar significant stage effect (p<0.0001; 2-way ANOVA, cf. Additional file 1: Table S6). All inter-stage differences are significant (p<0.0001-0.01) in Bonferroni’s multiple comparison tests
Bottom: d, Cohen’s effect size based on pooled SD (d=(|mean₂-mean₁|)/SD_pooled, in which ‘2’ refers to the later stage and ‘1’ to the earlier one), and bias corrected (Hedges). For the values of the means, see top. ^a,b significant differences of d between therapy groups as the means are mutually excluded from the confidence interval of the other therapy group

ISSN: 1471-2474