Objectives: Chronic inflammatory arthritis in children under 16 years persisting for at least 6 months is termed juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) with unknown cause. Several investigations report an up to 70% prevalence of TMJ involvement. Method: The study included 45 randomly selected patients with JIA (32 females and 13 males) with a mean age of 13.5 years, who were examined for TMJ disorders by manual functional analysis.The clinical diagnosis differentiated between arthropathy and myopathy. Disease was categorized according to the International League of Associations for Rheumatology (ILAR).Results: Children under 7 years were excluded from analysis because of non reproducible outcome. Fourteen (37%) of the remaining 38 participants had arthropathy and 22 (58%) myopathy. The results classified according to the ILAR criteria are depicted in the following table:

ILAR -subtype	Patients evaluated (male/female)	Arthropathy (male/female)	Myopathy (male/female)	Myoarthropathy (male/female)	No Symptoms (male/female)
rheumatoid factor neg. polyarthritis	9 = 100% (2/7)	0 =  0% (0/0)	3 = 33% (0/3)	2 = 22% (0/2)	4 =44% (2/2)
5 = 100% (1/4)	0 = 0% (0/0)	2 =40% (1/1)	1 = 20% (0/1)	2 = 40% (0/2)
6 = 100% (0/6)	1 = 17% (0/1)	1 = 17% (0/1)	2 = 33% (0/2)	2 = 33% (0/2)
4 =100% (1/3)	1 = 25% (0/1)	2 = 50% (0/2)	0 = 0% (0/0)	1 = 33% (1/0)
10 = 100% (6/4)	1 = 10% (1/0)	2= 20% (1/1)	4 = 40% (2/2)	3 = 30% (2/1)

Conclusion: At present, the ILAR classification is the international standardized system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study using this classification to investigate TMJ disorders in JIA patients. Further studies are required to evaluate if there is a correlation between TMJ involvement and the different ILAR subgroups.

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