Introduction
TMD, Pain, TMD myalgia, temporomandibular joints, pain, neuropathic, idiopathic, orofacial pain
TEMPOROMANDIBULAR DISORDER
Pain is considered a global health issue since it not only influences quality of life for one-fifth of the world’s adult population, but also causes massive costs for patients, the health care system, and society [According to its temporal and aetiological categorization, pain can be classified as acute or chronic, and as nociceptive, neuropathic, nociplastic, idiopathic (e.g. pain of unknown origin), or mixed pain [To understand clinical pain, experimental pain models are utilized with healthy and homogenous participants, without confounding factors such as medications, age differences, illnesses, or external factors such as weather, ongoing wars. Furthermore, they can be performed in a standardized and controlled setting, with distinct start and end-points allowing quantitative assessments [A common orofacial pain is associated with the temporomandibular disorder (TMD), described as all pain conditions affecting the masticatory muscles (and associated structures) and/or the temporomandibular joints [It is suggested that TMD myalgia has a multifactorial aetiology due to complex interactions between biological, psychological, social, and environmental factors [Cocoa is believed to be linked to serotonin through tryptophan, a precursor of serotonin and an essential amino acid found in this widely consumed dietary product [It has also been found that a cocoa-enriched diet inhibits neurogenic inflammatory pain in rats, which implies the possible use of cocoa as an alternative therapy for pain control in humans [Taken together, the aim of this study was to investigate if the ingestion of products with different percentages of cocoa affects the experimentally induced pain caused by intramuscular injections of hypertonic saline into the masseter muscle in healthy men and women. The hypothesis of the project was that the higher the cocoa content of the chocolate consumed, the less pain is experienced.