The risk of temporomandibular disorder in patients with depression: a population-based cohort study

This study used a population-based retrospective cohort design to examine whether depression is a risk factor of temporomandibular disorder (TMD).

From a universal insurance database, we identified 7587 patients who are newly diagnosed individuals with depression in 2000 and 2001. A total of 30,197 comparison subjects were randomly selected from a nondepression cohort. Both groups were followed until the end of 2008 to measure the incidence of TMD.

The incidence of TMD was 2.65 times higher in the depression cohort than in the nondepression cohort (6.16 versus 2.32 per 1000 person-years). The hazard ratio (HR) measured by multivariate Cox's proportional hazard regression analysis of TMD for the depression cohort was 2.21 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.83-2.66), after controlling for socio-demographic factors and other psychiatric comorbidities. Women had higher risk to develop TMD than men (HR 1.61, 95% CI 1.36-1.92 for women without depression; HR 3.54, 95% CI 2.81-4.45 for women with depression).

This study demonstrates that patients with depression are at an elevated risk of developing TMD.