How Can Precision Medicine be Applied to Temporomandibular Disorders and its Comorbidities?

Tmj Association, Brookfield WI

Investigators

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY The Eighth Scientific Meeting of The TMJ Association, How Can Precision Medicine be applied to Temporomandibular Disorders and its Comorbidities?, is scheduled to be held on September 11-13, 2016 at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Conference Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The need for this meeting is driven by several critical issues: First, there are an estimated 36 million people affected by temporomandibular disorders (TMD) in the US, the majority being women in their childbearing years with consequential physical, psychological and financial burdens. Second, there continues to be a dearth of scientific understanding of the etiology of these conditions, their diagnosis, comorbidities and treatment. Third, TMD represents a chronic pain condition, which is one among a cluster of prevalent pain conditions that frequently co-occur and predominantly affect women. The 2016 meeting is focused on how methods of Precision Medicine can inform the treatment of TMD and the comorbid pain conditions so many patients experience. Current diagnostics and treatments do not reflect the current state of the science and fall short in meeting the needs of symptomatic patients. The application of Precision Medicine technology to TMD and its comorbidities will enable providers to more accurately classify TMD patients into subgroups according to specific diagnostic criteria and lead to tailored, more successful treatments to relieve their pain and suffering. Presentations and discussions will focus on the challenges of obtaining precise molecular and phenotypic measurements from thousands of patients, repeatedly and efficiently. Challenges addressing methods to analyze and integrate large data sets from multiple modalities such as clinical measurements, imaging data, DNA sequence variants, and epigenetic profiles will be addressed. The meeting will engage key scientific leaders, NIH representatives and patient advocates and will develop recommendations to advance research in this field. The Specific Aims of the conference are to: 1. Convene scientists to explore how ?precision medicine? can be applied to advance the diagnostics and treatments of the unique pathologies of subsets of TMD patients and comorbid pain conditions. 2. To assess what kinds of studies could be mounted in precision medicine and how aggregated results of ?N- of-1 trials? can provide information on how to improve treatment of patients with these pain conditions. 3. Determine which physiological and clinical tests (genetic, neurological, micobiomic, etc.) can best characterize subsets of TMD patients enabling more selective?and more effective?treatments. 4. Invite and introduce the next generation of young investigators to the field of TMD and comorbid pain conditions and to the basic and clinical research challenges/opportunities they represent. 5. Develop recommendations for the scientific community and NIH which will advance our understanding of how applications in precision medicine would be applied to TMD and comorbid chronic pain conditions.