Jaw and Mouth
Why does my jaw hurt all the time?
Clicking, aching, or a jaw that catches when you open wide usually gets filed under TMJ or TMD: temporomandibular joint disorder. The usual explanations are grinding your teeth at night, stress, or an old injury, and for a lot of people that's the whole story.
We're not doctors. This page collects what the published research actually says about a less commonly mentioned cause, so you have something concrete to bring to your own appointment.
The Hypermobility Link Behind TMJ and Jaw Pain
The jaw is a joint like any other, and in hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) and classical EDS, that joint can be affected the same way knees or shoulders are. A 2023 study in Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases followed 259 people with confirmed hEDS or classical EDS (230 with hEDS, 29 with classical EDS). At least 49.2% had painful or restricted jaw movement, 84.9% had pain in the muscles used for chewing, and 46.3% had a diagnosed TMD. People with a TMD diagnosis in this group had 2.5 times the risk of chronic pain overall.
Two follow-up studies dug into why. Yekkalam et al. (2024, Journal of Oral Rehabilitation) looked at TMD risk factors in 185 women with confirmed hEDS. A separate case-control study by Bech et al. (2022) compared 26 people with genetically confirmed hEDS to 39 healthy controls and examined TMD, bite force, and structural changes in the jaw joint directly. This has been studied specifically in hEDS and classical EDS populations, with control groups, not just inferred from general joint hypermobility.
Related topic
Jaw Pain and TMJ (hub topic) — not yet published as its own page.
Bringing this to your dentist or doctor
If jaw pain has been a fixture for years and nothing has fully explained it, mentioning joint hypermobility in the rest of your body is worth doing at your next appointment. A dentist or TMJ specialist familiar with connective tissue conditions may approach treatment differently than one working from a grinding-only theory. This isn't a reason to stop existing treatment on your own; it's a reason to widen the conversation.
Sources referenced on this page
- 01Bech AL, et al. Temporomandibular disorders in patients with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and hypermobility spectrum disorder. Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases, 2023.
- 02Yekkalam N, et al. Risk factors for temporomandibular disorders in women with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Journal of Oral Rehabilitation, 2024.
- 03Bech AL, et al. Case-control study of TMD, bite force, and TMJ changes in genetically confirmed hEDS. 2022.