Diagnosis and quantification of sleep bruxism: New analysis method for the Bruxcore Bruxism Monitoring Device is suitable for clinical use

The aim of this study was to assess the objectivity of a newly developed computer-based analysis method for the Bruxcore Bruxism Monitoring Device (BBMD), and to evaluate the ability of the BBMD to differentiate between patients with and without sleep bruxism (SB). A total of 48 SB patients and 21 non-bruxing controls participated in the study. After detailed functional diagnosis by a dentist according to the clinical criteria for the diagnosis of SB of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), each participant was fitted with a BBMD and instructed to wear it for 5 consecutive nights. Subsequently, the appliances were digitized, and their abrasion was assessed by two independent raters using the new method, in which the abraded area was measured in pixels. Inter-rater reliability was very high, as is reflected by an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.99 between the two raters. Mean pixel scores for SB patients were about 8 times higher than those for the controls. Using 2,900 as the cutoff pixel score, the method achieved a sensitivity of 79.2%, a specificity of 95.2%, and positive and negative predictive values of 97.4% and 66.7%, respectively. The results of this study support the view that the newly developed analyzing method of Bruxcore analysis is objective, capable of differentiating between patients with and without SB, and suitable for clinical use. Keywords: sleep bruxism, quantification, abrasion, reliability, clinical diagnosis, monitoring, practicability