Exercise therapy improves pain and mouth opening in temporomandibular disorders: A systematic review with meta-analysis.

Jaw pain and stiffness from temporomandibular disorders can be difficult to manage, and clinicians have several options including exercise programmes, splints, and manual therapies. This systematic review pooled data from 16 randomized controlled trials, involving 812 participants, to see whether exercise therapy helps with pain and with how far the mouth can open, either actively or when moved passively. Across the pooled studies, exercise therapy was associated with reduced pain, a higher pain pressure threshold, and greater active and passive mouth opening compared with control approaches. When exercise was combined with a splint, results for pain and mouth opening were better than splint use alone, and exercise alone outperformed other physiotherapy approaches like manual therapy and electrotherapy on pain pressure threshold specifically.

These are useful signals, but the review draws on a modest, mixed set of trials, and the abstract does not report the certainty of the evidence or risk of bias across studies, so the findings should be read as promising rather than conclusive.

If you deal with jaw pain or trouble opening your mouth fully because of a temporomandibular disorder, you may be curious whether exercises aimed at the jaw actually help. This review combined findings from 16 clinical trials with over 800 participants total to look at exactly that question, comparing exercise therapy against other treatments like splints or standard physiotherapy. The combined results suggest exercise therapy was linked to less pain, a higher threshold for pressure-related pain, and improved mouth opening, both when opening the jaw yourself and when it was moved for you.

Adding exercise to splint use appeared to work better than splints alone for pain and mouth opening. Exercise also appeared to outperform manual therapy and electrotherapy specifically for pain pressure threshold. These results come from a modest collection of trials, and the review does not describe how reliable or high-quality that underlying evidence was.

That means the findings are encouraging but not the final word, and they describe group-level patterns rather than a guarantee for any one person's experience.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

This systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 16 randomized controlled trials (n=812) examining exercise therapy for temporomandibular disorders, evaluating pain, pain pressure threshold, and active and passive maximum mouth opening. Using a random-effects model, exercise therapy showed a statistically significant benefit over comparators for pain (SMD -0.58, 95% CI -1.01 to -0.12), pain pressure threshold (SMD 0.45, 95% CI 0.14-0.76), active mouth opening (SMD 0.43, 95% CI 0.14-0.71), and passive mouth opening (SMD 0.4, 95% CI 0.06-0.75). Subgroup analyses indicated exercise plus splint outperformed splint alone on pain (SMD -0.5, 95% CI -0.73 to -0.26), active opening (SMD 1.14, 95% CI 0.22-2.07), and passive opening (SMD 0.56, 95% CI 0.06-1.06), while exercise alone outperformed manual therapy and electrotherapy approaches specifically on pain pressure threshold (SMD 0.48, 95% CI 0.09-0.87). All confidence intervals are wide, several approaching the null, which limits precision in effect size estimates.

The abstract does not report heterogeneity statistics, risk of bias assessment, or certainty grading (such as GRADE), so the overall strength and consistency of this evidence base cannot be fully appraised from the information given.