The subjective pain ratings following the stimfMRI scans also showed this gradient pattern, with a trend towards significance for the high-impact TMD group reporting greater mean pain ratings compared to controls (p = 0.069).
Based on the findings, there certainly appears to be a trend showing that chronic TMD pain patients display greater brain activations in response to our stimulus than controls, but these between-group difference did not reach statistical significance, at least partially due to the factors we outlined.
Despite certain large effect sizes, pairwise comparisons failed to reach significance thresholds for any parcels meaning that no significant between-group differences were found.