Effects of Manual Therapy and Home Exercise Treatment on Pain, Stress, Sleep, and Life Quality in Patients with Bruxism: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Bruxism, the habit of clenching or grinding teeth, often brings jaw pain, poor sleep, and stress along with it, and physiotherapists sometimes offer hands-on treatment or home exercises to help. This small trial compared manual therapy against a home exercise program in thirty young adults with bruxism, tracking pain, sleep quality, stress, jaw symptoms, and quality of life before and after eight weeks of treatment. Both approaches led to improvements within each group across nearly all measures, and when the two groups were compared directly, manual therapy showed an edge specifically for sleep quality and jaw-related symptoms, while pain, stress, and quality of life improved similarly regardless of which treatment was used. Because the sample was small and limited to people aged eighteen to twenty five, these results offer an early signal rather than firm proof, and it remains unclear how well the findings would hold in older or more diverse groups.

If you deal with bruxism, the grinding or clenching of teeth that can bring jaw pain, disrupted sleep, and stress, you might wonder whether hands-on physiotherapy or exercises you do yourself at home would help more. This study looked at exactly that question in thirty young adults, splitting them into a group that received manual therapy from a therapist and a group that followed a home exercise program for eight weeks. Both groups reported feeling better afterward, with less pain, lower stress, and better quality of life, and there wasn't a clear difference between the two approaches on those measures.

Where manual therapy did stand out was in improving sleep quality and easing jaw-specific symptoms more than the home exercises did. It's worth keeping in mind that this was a small study of young adults only, so while the findings are encouraging for both approaches, they don't yet tell us how lasting these benefits are or how they'd apply more broadly.

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

For clinicians weighing whether bruxism patients need in-clinic manual therapy or can be guided through a home exercise program instead, this trial offers a direct comparison rather than a comparison against no treatment. Thirty patients aged eighteen to twenty five were randomised to manual therapy or home exercise and assessed after eight weeks using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, Perceived Stress Scale, Fonseca Anamnestic Index for temporomandibular symptoms, SF-36 quality of life, trigger point counts, and pain levels across activity, night, and rest. Within-group improvements were seen across nearly all outcomes in both arms, but the more clinically informative result is the between-group comparison: manual therapy produced significantly greater gains in sleep quality, temporomandibular symptom severity (Fonseca index), and trigger point counts, while pain intensity, perceived stress, and quality of life improved comparably between groups with no statistically significant difference detected.

This suggests home exercise may be a reasonable alternative when manual therapy access is limited, at least for those three outcomes. The main limitation is sample size, just fifteen per group, which restricts confidence in the magnitude of effects and the generalisability beyond this narrow young adult population. The trial also does not report longer-term follow-up, so durability of the sleep and symptom improvements attributed to manual therapy remains unknown.