Association between INADL genetic variant and a subgroup with high risk for TMD in the OPPERA study

Background A major impediment to addressing the epidemic of persistent pain conditions is the development of classification procedures that capture the mosaic of signs and symptoms that accompany these disorders. According to the bio-psycho-social model, the measurable features of an idiopathic pain condition such as temporomandibular disorder (TMD) are associated with abnormalities in sensory, psychological, neuroimmune, and autonomic systems, which arise due to the interaction of genetic and environmental risk factors. Using a high-dimensional dataset derived from a large TMD case-control study, we have developed a new method to integrate clinically assessed intermediate phenotypes across bio-psycho-social domains, clustering subjects in a manner that provides clinically useful prognostic and diagnostic information. We performed a candidate gene association study to identify genes that influence cluster assignment in order to characterize the genetic determination of these clusters.