Effectiveness of an 8-week neck exercise training on pain, jaw function, and oral health-related quality of life in women with chronic temporomandibular disorders: a randomized controlled trial.

Temporomandibular disorders, or jaw pain conditions, often involve the neck as well, which raises the question of whether treating the neck could help jaw symptoms too. This trial compared an 8-week neck exercise program against manual therapy and a placebo treatment in women with chronic myofascial or mixed jaw pain, tracking pain, jaw function, quality of life related to oral health, and jaw movement at several points up to three months later. The neck exercise group showed better pain and jaw function than the placebo group right after treatment and at both follow-up points, and better quality of life scores than both the manual therapy and placebo groups at the end of treatment and at three months. This is interesting because it suggests a low-supervision, conservative exercise approach targeting the neck might have benefits for jaw-related outcomes, though the trial was small, involved only 54 women, and the abstract does not report whether neck exercise directly outperformed manual therapy on pain or function specifically.

If you have chronic jaw pain or a temporomandibular disorder, you may have noticed that neck stiffness or discomfort often comes along with it. Researchers wanted to know whether exercises for the neck muscles could actually help jaw pain and function, not just neck symptoms, so they tested an 8-week neck exercise program against manual therapy (hands-on treatment) and a placebo treatment in a group of women with chronic jaw pain. Women doing the neck exercises reported better pain relief and jaw function than those in the placebo group, both right after the program and up to three months later.

They also reported better quality of life related to oral health than either the placebo group or the manual therapy group at some time points. This is encouraging, but it comes from a small study of just 54 women, so the findings would need to be confirmed in larger trials before we can be confident about how much benefit to expect or how it compares directly to manual therapy for every outcome measured.

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

This randomized controlled trial allocated 54 women with RDC/TMD-diagnosed myofascial or mixed temporomandibular disorder to neck motor control training (NTG), manual therapy (MTG), or placebo (PG), assessing pain (Visual Analog Scale), jaw function (Mandibular Function Impairment Questionnaire), oral health-related quality of life (Oral Health Impact Profile-14), and jaw range of motion at baseline, post-treatment, and one- and three-month follow-up using mixed-model repeated-measures ANOVA with Bonferroni correction. NTG outperformed PG on pain and jaw function at all three post-baseline assessments, with effect sizes greater than 0.7, indicating a large statistical effect by conventional benchmarks. For oral health-related quality of life, NTG exceeded both MTG and PG at end of treatment and at three months, also with effect sizes above 0.7.

The abstract does not report a direct statistical comparison of NTG versus MTG for pain, jaw function, or range of motion, so whether neck exercise outperformed manual therapy on those specific outcomes remains unclear. Given the modest sample size split across three arms, single-sex population, and absence of reported adverse event data, these results should be interpreted as preliminary evidence supporting further investigation into neck-targeted interventions for TMD rather than definitive confirmation of superiority over active manual therapy.