INfORM Welcome
I am happy to welcome you to INfORM’s new website. Please take a browse of our recently launched website. If you are new, I suggest you first check out our pages that define who we are and what we do. And don’t be shy. If our work appeals to you, please introduce yourself to those on the executive or chairing committees. We want to get to know you and learn how, working together, we may further our mission. If you are already a member, check out what is new. Either way, come back often since changes are coming and will continue as we grow to better meet our mission. I wish to thank Richard Ohrbach and Juan Fernando Oyarzo, past & present chairs of the Website Committee, for making this website transition a reality.
I am privileged to serve in helping shepherd INfORM for the next year, taking over from a long list of distinguished academicians and leaders who shaped the organization into what it is today. Starting out as the International RDC/TMD Consortium with a focus on the diagnosis of TMD, we have come a long way over the years to encompass other orofacial pains and related disorders. But our work is far from finished. As a volunteer organization, our lifeblood are its members that donate their time and expertise and work together in furthering our common goals, that is furthering high-quality science related to clinical orofacial pain and related methodologies, with the ultimate goal of bettering the lives of the patients we serve.
To highlight a few of our recent accomplishments:
– INfORM members have been working with patient advocacy groups, namely the TMJ Association and the Facial Pain Association, to help develop registries for their members, which will facilitate future research.
– We have developed the DC/TMD for Children and Adolescents, which is now being translated into other languages for wider use.
– A new committee, the Early Career Researchers (ECR), was formed under the guidance of Flavia Kapos and Sonia Sharma. In a short time, this committee has grown quickly and has held virtual and in-person mentorship meetings and has also initiated ECR travel awards to support young investigators to attend IADR meetings, so that their research may garner greater exposure.
– The Education Committee is another new committee, under the leadership of Chris Penlington. This committee is working towards mapping the similarities and differences in existing TMD education recommendations for dental students around the world with the goal of developing standardized curricula to help ensure gaps in education are not occurring.
– In an effort to bring greater awareness to our unified work, INfORM-sponsored research and works sponsored by INfORM members are now eligible to include INfORM in group authorship. To date there are 4 published articles with INfORM endorsement.
Although I cannot thank each individual, I would be remiss if I did not express gratitude to all those who have given and continue to give their time. We currently have 140 active members, of which 41 were in attendance in Bogota, Colombia. Coming off a successful IADR meeting, I could feel the renewed sense of enthusiasm of our members. I look forward to seeing what we as a community can achieve together in the years to come!
Don Nixdorf
INfORM President 2023-2024
Previously known as: International RDC/TMD Consortium Network
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Feb 1, 2020. The INfORM website will not migrate to the IADR webserver. Instead, two websites will be maintained: the IADR-based website for INfORM will serve organizational needs as part of IADR, while this website will maintain materials pertaining to INfORM activities. Meanwhile, this website remains incomplete compared to its prior version from 2000 through February 2017. If you have reached this page while trying to link to a particular page or document, your linking-URL will currently not work. Our apologies. We encourage you to check back for updates. |
| Our goal is to advance the scientific knowledge of temporomandibular disorders (TMD), orofacial pain, and jaw disorders through scientifically developed diagnostic tools based on standardized assessment. These tools are intended to be applicable to both research and clinical settings, including international use, multi-site and cross-cultural research studies. We review progress at our annual meetings and international consensus workshops. Please contact us if you are interested in participating in our activities; our past meetings will give you an idea of what we do. | The core tool that established the Consortium, the Research Diagnostic Criteria for Temporomandibular Disorders (RDC/TMD), remains a model for pain research. That tool is now replaced by the DC/TMD (2014) for both clinical and research use. The next wave of research regarding TMDs and how they are conceptualized will be conducted using the DC/TMD as well as other research tools that will be posted on this site. Our methods include population studies, clinical epidemiology and clinical trials, and experimental human studies. |
AnnouncementsRevised Self-report Instrument Scoring Manual for DC/TMD (03/30/2021). Minor errors were corrected. Developing Evidence-based Management Guidelines for Temporomandibular Disorders (9/1/2020). An INfORM-sponsored symposium previously planned for IADR/March2020 was held via Zoom on Nov 18, 2020. Details, including slide pack and video stream, are here. INfORM Young Investigator Awards, sponsored by Quintessence Publishing and Journal of Oral & Facial Pain and Headache (10/12/2020). The first two competitions have been held: IADR-London 2018 and IADR-Vancouver 2019; guidelines are available. Awards and winners are listed under Meetings. The competition scheduled for March 2020 (Washington DC) was held remotely in 2021 due to pandemic-related cancellation of the full meeting. A new competition was planned for the 2021 all-virtual IADR meeting but it was cancelled due to insufficient number of applicants. A 2022 competition will be held. Translations of the DC/TMD (09/12/2021). Completed translations continue to arrive. So far in 2021, Arabic, Croatian, Korean, and Lithuanian have been completed. Finnish has been revised. Japanese assessment instruments are updated to the most current tools, and both examiner protocol and scoring manual are fully translated into Japanese as well. More languages are nearing completion: stay tuned. DC/TMD Examiner Training (09/10/2021). The Guidelines for examiner training and calibration as well as the list of training centers have been updated. There are currently no scheduled training courses. Click for further information regarding the most recent course. Consortium activities at IADR-London (10/12/2020). Two invitational workshops focused on development of a brief DC/TMD for routine clinical use, and a DC/TMD adapted for children and adolescents. The latter project is now completed and under review at a journal. Consortium activities at IADR-Seoul, Republic of South Korea (3/15/2016; updated 10/12/2020). The manuscripts from all three workshops have now been published regarding Axis II implementation in international settings. DC/TMD examination videos (3/15/2016). The English language version was released in 2014 and published via MedEdPORTAL. That version has now been accompanied by a Swedish language version, to be released soon on the website. Others are encouraged to develop other language versions or to consider how the English language version can be modified with menu-selected sub-titles. See the DC/TMD page for further information. An Executive Summary of the DC/TMD was published (3/15/2016). This publication was developed for the target audience of the general dentist. It is available at JADA. |
Website Updates(11/23/2020) RDC/Burning Mouth Syndrome protocol added to Other Research/Research Protocols. (11/23/2020) Other Instruments page updated with functional links; new instrument (stand-alone GCPS 1-month, based on original GCPS, published 1992) (11/23/2020) Translation agreement updated; Summary list and accompanying flow chart of translation procedures substantially updated. See Other Resources/Translation Guidelines. (10/12/2020) DC/TMD Translations page is up to date. (02/03/2020) Updated text-revisions of the DC/TMD decision tree and diagnosis table were added to the DC/TMD main page. |