Publication date: Aug 26, 2024

The social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted in-person activities, which were immediately followed by adaptations to ensure, for example, the continuity of teaching. This generated emotional impacts on the academic community. Emotional states may trigger or emphasize conditions such as temporomandibular dysfunction (TMD), causing pain and limiting masticatory function. This study aimed to compare the students and the faculty of a medical school first in terms of the TMD-caused pain they experienced during social isolation and reported two months later, according to their recollections, using the TMD-Pain Screener questionnaire. The second basis for comparison was the emotional state generated by social isolation and its connection with TMD symptoms assessed through the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21), which considers perceptions at the time of data collection. Both questionnaires were responded to in May 2022 after the end of social isolation. The data were analyzed by the IBM-SPSS software for Windows 22. 0 with a 5% level of significance. The results show that the self-reported TMD symptoms were more widespread (p = 0. 002) and intense (p = 0. 013) among students than among faculty and that all of the former’s DASS-21 domains (depression, anxiety, and stress) were also more strongly evident (p

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Semantics

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