Phantom Odontalgia: Diagnostic and treatment challenges.

A toothache, also known as odontalgia or, less frequently, as odontalgy, is an aching pain in or around a tooth.

Atypical odontalgia is a form of toothache present in apparently normal teeth, or which persists after the supposedly offending tooth has been removed.

Some sources consider atypical odontalgia to be a sub-type of atypical facial pain, although others treat them as the same entity.

The cause of atypical odontalgia is not yet clear, and many different theories have been proposed, including theories that the pain is psychogenic in nature.

TMD is considered by some to be one of the 4 major symptom complexes in chronic orofacial pain, along with burning mouth syndrome, atypical facial pain and atypical odontalgia.

More recently, BMS has been described as one of the 4 recognizable symptom complexes of chronic facial pain, along with atypical facial pain, temporomandibular joint dysfunction and atypical odontalgia.

Other sources use atypical odontalgia and AFP as synonyms, or describe atypical odontalgia as a sub-type, variant, or intra-oral equivalent of AFP.

Atypical odontalgia is similar in nature to AFP, but the latter term generally is used where the pain is confined to the teeth or gums, and AFP when the pain involves other parts of the face.

Due to the variability and imprecision of their pain symptoms, ATN or Atypical Odontalgia patients may be misdiagnosed with "Atypical Facial Pain" or "hypochondriasis", both of which are considered problematic by many practitioners.

Symptoms of ATN may overlap with a similarly unexplained pain occurring in teeth called atypical odontalgia (literal meaning "unusual tooth pain"), with aching, burning, or stabs of pain localized to one or more teeth and adjacent jaw.

Some form of nerve deafferentation is plausible, but it is likely that AFP and atypical odontalgia are in truth umbrella terms for a collection of multiple different causes of pain which have not been properly diagnosed or are not yet fully understood.

Atypical odontalgia (AO, also termed phantom tooth pain, psychogenic toothache, or persistent dentoalveolar pain disorder), is very similar in many respects to AFP, with some sources treating them as the same entity, and others describing the former as a sub-type of AFP.

"continuous pain in the teeth or in a tooth socket after extraction in the absence of any identifiable dental cause," (International headache society, description included as a side note of "persistent idiopathic facial pain" in the ICHD-2, i.e. with is no separate diagnosis for atypical odontalgia).