Clinical Evaluation of the Intra-articular Injection of Sodium
Hyaluronate for the Patients Suffering from
Internal Derangement with Persistent Pain.


Ritsuo Takagi, Tatsuaki Kobayashi, Masataka Fukuda,
Kayoko Nozawa, Kazuhiro Ono, Yasushi Ohashi
2nd Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Niigata University School of Dentistry


Abstract:
We performed the clinical evaluation of intra-articular injections of sodium hyaluronate for 18 patients with painful internal derangement of TMJ.
  Eighteen patients,2 men and 16 wemen,with an average of 53.3 years old, were composed of 4 cases with type III and 14 cases with type IV, according to the classification of the Japanese Association on TMJ.
  Sodium hyaluronate was weekly iniected to the superior joint space for each patient under local anesthesia, and it was regularly continued for 4 or 5 weeks.
  The degree of pain at each out-coming was evaluated with use of visual analogue scale, and the degree of dysfunction was observed by maximum opening range and some other indexes.
  The rate of pain release was 77.8% and improvement rate of dysfunction was also 77.8%. Besides,there was no complication due to drug and/or puncture procedure to the superior joint space of the TMJ. Therefore, this strategy was extremely useful for patients with a persistent pain of the TMJ.


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