Dear Cosmetic Dentistry Insider,
Temporomandibular disorder (TMD)-related pain is believed to occur more commonly in women than men. However, strategies that target women's hormonal cycles to control pain appear to be ineffective, according to a new study in the journal Pain.
But the University of Washington research team was encouraged by the potential benefits of cognitive-behavioral therapy. They compared three treatment strategies applied to women with TMD-related pain that included general self-management pain training and oral contraceptive therapy, and found that behavioral therapies can help ease women's TMD pain.
Read more about how behavioral therapy can be used to ease TMD-related pain in our latest Cosmetic Dentistry Insider Exclusive.
In other Cosmetics Community news, a legal battle between the New Jersey Dental Association (NJDA) and a New Jersey tanning salon that offers teeth-whitening services has taken an interesting turn. The NJDA filed a lawsuit late last year against Beach Bum Tanning alleging unfair competition on behalf of its members and accusing Beach Bum salons of practicing dentistry without a license. But now a judge has ruled in favor of the tanning company. Click here for the full story.
Also, a U.S. federal jury found that the bisphosphonate drug Zometa made by Novartis Pharmaceuticals was not to blame for the osteonecrosis of the jaw developed by a Rhode Island man who died of cancer in 2005. Read more.
In other legal developments, the first of dozens of Fixodent denture cream lawsuit has been dismissed after a pretrial judge excluded expert witness testimony from the plaintiffs, and the Connecticut State Dental Commission has ruled that tooth whitening is dentistry and can no longer be performed at spas, salons, and shopping malls unless it is done under the supervision of a licensed dentist..
On the clinical front, a study in the Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA) has found that dental patients have varying degrees of sensitivity to certain aesthetic issues, and clinicians can expect their patients to be more attentive to some aesthetic factors than to others.
Meanwhile, another JADA study found that cancer patients on zoledronic acid and chemotherapy combined with the antiangiogenic agent bevacizumab who underwent a dental exam before starting treatment did not develop osteonecrosis of the jaw. Read more.
Finally, accurate shade matching is one of the primary challenges of aesthetic dentistry. Now a new study that tested several aesthetic restorative materials found that most exhibited a perceptible color change after polymerization.
