How do you stop patients from grinding their teeth? Zap them with electricity. At least, that's the thinking behind Grindcare, a device released in Europe last year.
The product, which won a Life Sciences Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2009 from Ernst & Young auditing firm, uses an electrode placed on the patient's temple to measure temporalis motions while the patient sleeps. Patients grimace, swallow, and clench when they first turn on the device, and it records their electromyography during these movements so it can distinguish among them, explained Medotech, the company that manufactures Grindcare.
Then the patients go to sleep. When it detects grinding or clenching, the Grindcare sends an electrical pulse through the electrode in the range of 1-7 mA. This intensity is not enough to cause pain but relaxes the muscle, according to Medotech.
The company cites a study published in the Journal of Oral Rehabilitation (March 2008, Vol. 35:3, pp. 171-183), for which researchers at the University of Aarhus and Aalborg University tried the device on 14 volunteers with sleep bruxism.
Over the course of five weeks, the devices were turned on or off, but the patients didn't know when. The researchers found that the patients' electromyographic activity was cut in half during the two sessions when the devices were on (54% ± 14% and 55% ± 17%, p < 0.001). They did not document any difference in symptoms of temporal mandibular disorder among the patients, however.
One of the researchers involved in that study had a financial stake in Medotech, while the other two did not.
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