Inamitsu, Tetsuaki · Nihon rinsho. Japanese journal of clinical medicine · 2009
Many people experience pain and discomfort in their face, jaw, and mouth that doctors and dentists cannot easily explain with standard tests. This review discusses how conditions like temporomandibular disorder (jaw pain), burning mouth syndrome, and facial pain are related to each other and to broader conditions like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. These conditions often occur alongside anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges, and treating them effectively requires a team approach including medication, physical therapy, and counseling.
This review highlights the significant overlap between orofacial pain syndromes and systemic functional somatic syndromes including chronic fatigue syndrome, emphasizing that dental symptoms in ME/CFS patients may reflect broader nervous system dysfunction rather than localized pathology. It underscores the importance of multidisciplinary, psychosomatic approaches to complex symptom clusters, which is directly relevant to improving clinical recognition and management of ME/CFS with comorbid pain conditions.
This review does not establish causal mechanisms underlying the overlap between orofacial and systemic functional somatic syndromes, nor does it provide empirical data on treatment efficacy for any specific condition. As a narrative review, it does not quantify prevalence, natural history, or treatment outcomes, and cannot determine whether overlapping symptoms reflect a common underlying pathophysiology or represent distinct conditions with shared risk factors.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
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