Evaluation of Clinical Symptoms Improvement by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Using a Smartphone Application in Patients with Temporomandibular Disorder

Since the start of the 2019 coronavirus pandemic, interest in digital therapeutics (DTx) has increased. Temporomandibular disorder (TMD) fundamentally requires cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), including physical self-regulation. An application that records TMD pain and parafunctional activities for CBT has recently been developed. However, evidence of the reduction of clinical symptoms in patients via repetitive software-driven CBT is lacking. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the impact of applications that support CBT regarding the performance of CBT and the improvement of clinical symptoms in temporomandibular joint patients. From 20 October 2020 to 7 January 2021, we randomly assigned 41 participants diagnosed with TMD to control (conventional treatment) and experimental (conventional treatment + application use) groups. We randomly assigned 41 participants diagnosed with TMD to control (conventional treatment) and experimental (conventional treatment + application use) groups. Improvements regarding the number of tender points, mouth opening, visual analog scale score, pain level upon palpation, joint sound, and stress were compared between the two groups. Compared with the control group, the experimental group showed significant improvements in the number of tender points and degree of mouth opening. They also showed improvements in pain level, joint sound, and locking, although not statistically significantly, as compared with the control group. Thus, further studies with a greater sample size need to be conducted to confirm the findings. Nevertheless, our results showed that repetitive cognitive behavioral therapy using a smartphone application can be used as digital therapeutics for temporomandibular disorder patients.