[Depression and neuropsychological testing in patients with temporomandibular disorders]

A cross-sectional retrospective study was undertaken, with the primary objective of discovering if there were any neuropsychological differences among and within groups. The California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) and the Brown-Peterson Consonant Trigram Auditory Memory Test (CCC) were used. Depression was assessed by the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI - Portuguese Version).The neuropsychological tests used did not present any statistically significant differences among the three groups studied, which might be due to the low proportion of patients with post high school education (20%). However, the experimental group (Groups I plus II) showed higher scores on depression (p<0.05) than Group III. In addition, Group II showed higher levels of depression (p<0.01) than Group I, and no statistical differences were found between Group I and III. Taken together, these results suggest that memory tests are highly dependent on the education levels of the participants and cannot be widely used. Additionally, depression plays a role not only in the etiology, but also in the perpetuation of TMD.