Table 4.
Predominant pain intensity from the masticatory system at three stages
| Pain intensity per therapy group: | |||||
| Physiotherapy (n=37) | Splint therapy (n=35) | ||||
| Initial visit | Start-Tx | LM | Initial visit | Start-Tx | LM |
| [mean (SD)] | [mean (SD)] | ||||
| 60.4 (22.4) | 41.0 (23.4) | 19.2 (26.4) | 53.6 (13.1) | 39.1 (22.5) | 11.5 (16.2) |
| Cohen’s d between stages, per therapy group: | |||||
| Physiotherapy | Splint therapy | ||||
| d | Confidence interval (95%) | d | Confidence interval (95%) | ||
| Initial visit vs start-Tx | 0.84 | 0.36–1.31 | 0.77 | 0.29–1.26 | |
| Start-Tx vs LM | 0.86a | 0.39–1.34 | 1.39a | 0.87–1.92 | |
| Initial visit vs LM | 1.66b | 1.13–2.19 | 2.83b | 2.17–3.49 | |
Top: mean pain intensity in mm on a 100 mm VAS and SD (between brackets) for predominant pain at three stages: initial visit, start of treatment (Start-Tx) and at the last post-treatment visit, last measurement (LM). Both therapy groups have a similar significant stage effect (p<0.0001; 2-way ANOVA, cf. Additional file 1: Table S6). All inter-stage differences are significant (p<0.0001-0.01) in Bonferroni’s multiple comparison tests
Bottom: d, Cohen’s effect size based on pooled SD (d=(|mean2-mean1|)/SDpooled, in which ‘2’ refers to the later stage and ‘1’ to the earlier one), and bias corrected (Hedges). For the values of the means, see top. a,b significant differences of d between therapy groups as the means are mutually excluded from the confidence interval of the other therapy group