Socio-demographic characteristics and pain in 75 Burning Mouth Syndrome patients

To examine socio-demographic and clinical characteristics in a subset of patients with Burning mouth Syndrome (BMS) and to analyze the relationships between these variables and pain. Methods: 75 subjects enrolled during the period from May 2012 to November 2012. Demographic characteristics and clinical information including age, sex, educational level, marital status, job status, age at disease onset, oral symptoms and triggers were collected. To assess pain, the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) was performed (fig 1). Results: Descriptive statistics, the Pearson Chi square tests, the Kruskal Wallis non-parametric tests and the Spearman bivariate correlation were used.The patient age ranged from 18-83 with a mean age of 61.17 (+/-11.75) and a female predominance of 3:1. The age at disease onset was 56.75 (+/-12.01). A lower educational level (8.57+/-4.95), and a high percentage of unemployment (80%) were found (table 1). There were no statistically significant differences in the VAS scale between males and females (p value 0.597) and in marital status (p value 0.495) but only in job status (the median and inter-quartile were 7-4 and 5-3 for unemployed and employed respectively; p value 0.019*) and in age at disease onset (Spearman correlation was 0.279; p value 0.015*). Table 2 and table 3 show the symptoms and triggers reported by the patients . Table 4 and table 5 show the dependence analysis of symptoms and triggers versus gender, marital status, job status, age, educational level and age at disease onset. Conclusions: The prevalence of BMS is higher in women, with a lower educational level, who are married and unemployed. Pain is higher in the unemployed. In addition, there was a diagnostic delay of about four years which modified the perception of pain. Clinical Relevance: A lower educational level, unemployment and diagnostic delay could influence clinical outcomes in BMS.