Objective: The aim of this literature review was to examine the effect of physical therapy in bruxism treatment.

Methods: The data sources used were Medline, Excerpta Medica Database, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Physiotherapy Evidence Database, SPORTDiscus, Scientific Electronic Library Online, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and Literatura Latino-Americana e do Caribe em Ciências da Saúde. We included randomized and nonrandomized and controlled and noncontrolled clinical trials and interventions focused on physical therapy as treatment for sleep bruxism or awake bruxism. Two reviewers independently screened the records, examined full-text reports for compliance with the eligibility criteria, and extracted data.

Results: The present review found 1296 articles. We excluded 766 duplicated articles and 461 irrelevant articles and selected 69 titles to read. Forty-five of these were excluded, leading to a total of 24 that met the eligibility criteria and were included in our analysis. The articles were grouped into 7 treatment methods used in physical therapy. The treatment methods were electrotherapeutic (14 articles), cognitive-behavioral therapy (3 articles), therapeutic exercises (2 articles), acupuncture (2 articles), postural awareness (1 article), muscular relaxation (1 article), and massage (1 article). Results and conclusions, methodological quality, and quality of evidence of each study were reported.

Conclusions: These results suggest very low-quality evidence that diverse methods used in physical therapy improve muscle pain and activity, mouth opening, oral health, anxiety, stress, depression, temporomandibular disorder, and head posture in individuals with bruxism. This finding is mainly a result of the poor methodological quality of most of the studies.

Author keywords: Bruxism, Physical Therapy Modalities, Clinical Trial

Author affiliations: Department of Physical Therapy, Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology and Occupational Therapy, School of Medicine, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

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