Objective:

To determine temporomandibular disorders (TMD) frequency in schoolchildren.

Material and methods:

Included 891 school children of three elementary public schools, we registered sociodemographic variables and temporomandibular evaluation with Helkimo clinic index used by World Health Organization, all evaluations were performance by ten undergraduates dentist with prior capacitation (interobserver Kappa=0,850) information was processed in SPSS V.21.0; to determine TMD prevalence we used descriptive statistics, to evaluate association between TMD with sex X2 was used.

Results:

Mean of age was 8.6±1.6 years, 54% were girls, 43.4% of students had temporomandibular disorders, 72.3% only one disorder, 20.4% two and 7.3% more than two disorders. TMD had no association with sex neither age (p>0.05).

Discussion:

TMD diagnostics in schoolchildren is infrequent, frequency and severity of this disorders will be modified by children's growth and development. TMD frequency was 43.3%, its distribution was similar in both sexes.

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