Gum Disease Causes These Deadly Diseases

It is tempting to think of gum disease as something that just happens inside our mouths, but many studies have linked it to heart disease and other potentially deadly diseases.

BMJ Open has just published a study that associates gum disease with a long list of health conditions, some of which are pretty surprising.

University of Birmingham scientists were fascinated by existing studies supporting the idea that gum disease is a risk factor for heart disease.

Since gum disease is assumed to do its damage by dumping bacteria and inflammatory chemicals into our bloodstreams, from where they spread throughout our bodies, the researchers wanted to find out which other diseases could result from gum disease.

To investigate this question, they analyzed data from 1995–2019 from the IQVIA Medical Research Database on British people.

They found data for 64,379 people who had been diagnosed by their general practitioners with gum diseases like gingivitis and periodontitis.

Gingivitis is the first step towards periodontitis; it involves a lot of plaque and inflammation. Periodontitis is more serious and involves the loss of the bone that keeps your teeth in place, eventually leading to tooth loss.

The researchers identified 60,995 participants with gingivitis and another 3,384 with periodontitis. They also found records on 251,161 people from the medical database who had not been diagnosed with gum disease with whom to compare their gum disease patients.

They made sure that both groups were approximately the same age (45 years), included the same ethnicities, had the same proportion of smokers (30%), had the same BMI scores, and had the same economic statuses.

They observed both groups for an average of 3.4 years to see who would go on to develop other diseases.

At the beginning of the study, before the observation period, the gum disease group had higher risks for several diseases:

1. 43% higher cardiovascular disease risk.
2. 16% higher cardiometabolic disease risk.
3. 33% higher autoimmune disease risk.
4. 79% higher mental illness risk.

At the end of the observation period, they found that people with gum disease still had an increased risk of all of these conditions:

1. 18% higher cardiovascular disease risk.
2. 7% higher cardiometabolic disease risk, with type-2 diabetes alone carrying a 26% increased risk.
3. 33% higher autoimmune disease risk.
4. 37% higher mental illness risk.

Since people with gum disease are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and mental illness, it places a serious burden on our healthcare systems and should be tackled with more enthusiasm.

Fortunately, it’s quite easy to reverse gum disease and regain your gums. Thousands of readers have done just that by following the simple and natural steps explained here…