Temporomandibular disorders among Brazilian adolescents: Reliability and validity of a screening questionnaire

Temporomandibular disorders (tmd) screeners assume significant item overlap with the screening questionnaire proposed by the american academy of orofacial pain (aaop). objective: to test the reliability and validity of the portuguese version of aaop questions for tmd screening among adolescents. material and methods: diagnoses from research diagnostic criteria for temporomandibular disorders (rdc/tmd) axis i were used as reference standard. reliability was evaluated by internal consistency (kr-20) and inter-item correlation. validity was tested by sensitivity,specificity,predictive values,accuracy and receiver operating characteristic (roc) curves,the relationship between the true-positive rate (sensitivity) and the false-positive rate (specificity). test-retest reliability of aaop questions and intra-examiner reproducibility of rdc/tmd axis i were tested with kappa statistics. results: the sample consisted of 1307 brazilian adolescents (56.8% girls; n=742),with mean age of 12.72 years (12.69 f/12.75 m). according to rdc/tmd,397 [30.4% (32.7% f/27.3% m)] of adolescents presented tmd,of which 330 [25.2% (27.6% f/22.2% m)] were painful tmd. because of low consistency,items #8 and #10 of the aaop questionnaire were excluded. remaining items (of the long questionnaire version) showed good consistency and validity for three positive responses or more. after logistic regression,items #4,#6,#7 and #9 also showed satisfactory consistency and validity for two or more positive responses (short questionnaire version). both versions demonstrated excellent specificity (about 90%),but higher sensitivity for detecting painful tmd (78.2%). better reproducibility was obtained for the short version (k=0.840). conclusions: the portuguese version of aaop questions showed both good reliability and validity for the screening of tmd among adolescents,especially painful tmd,according to rdc/tmd.