Shelby Township Dentist discusses Periodontal Disease
Hi, I’m Dr. Heather Pranzarone Stratton at HPS Advanced Dental Care. We’re a dental office in Shelby Township, Michigan. Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about periodontal disease. We have a lot of patients that come in that might have periodontal disease or have questions about periodontal disease. The studies have shown that about 80% of the population has some form of periodontal disease. So we know it’s fairly common to have periodontal disease, especially after the age of 35, is typically when we start seeing it.
We start screening people at our office around the age of 21, if we see any signs before that of any form of periodontal disease, we’ll screen them a little earlier. But the screening process is very easy, we will take little measurements around each 1 of your teeth and we look at some x-rays, determine if you have any bone loss, and that’s how we determine if you have periodontal disease.
The reason why we take this very seriously at our office is because we know that periodontal disease will absolutely affect your overall health. There have been lots of studies that have been done from lots of different organizations. Not just dental organizations, but all sorts of organizations. We know that periodontal disease is a chronic infection that you have in your mouth that’s around your teeth. It can affect the bone levels supporting your teeth which will eventually lead to tooth loss if not treated.
We also know, that because it’s a chronic infection, and it’s caused by bacteria, that that bacteria can get into your bloodstream, and wreak havoc on a lot of different organ system that you have in your body. We know that it can cause, it can be a risk factor for heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, pre-term, low-weight birth for your children, if you’re a mother that has periodontal disease. So there is a lot of different risk factors.
People who are diabetic, we don’t know that if necessarily causes diabetes but we do know that if you are diabetic, your periodontal disease typically will get significantly worse. We’ve actually had several patients in the office, they had no idea they had diabetes, and when we looked inside their mouth and saw that they had periodontal disease, we asked them to go to see their physician because they might be diabetic. We also have cardiologists that refer to our office so that people’s periodontal disease can get treated so that their heart disease can improve significantly. So because of that we take it very seriously. The good news is, is that periodontal disease is very easily treated.
It’s fairly non-invasive. It’s basically a little bit more than just getting your teeth cleaned. So, if we find out that you do have periodontal disease, and we catch it at an early stage, that’s fantastic, not so much that you have periodontal disease but it’s fantastic we caught it at early stage and we can treat it, not only save your teeth, save your smile, improve your breath, it will also affect your overall health to make you healthier in the long run. So that’s good news that it can be so easily treated.
The bad news is once we know that you have periodontal disease, you’ll have it for the rest of your life because it’s caused by a bacteria and it is an infection. We can keep it at bay but we can never get rid of it entirely. There’s been talk about getting vaccines for periodontal disease and so on and so forth. That hasn’t really come about yet, but there are many different things that we can do. A lot of our patients don’t want to be put on a medication or, or anything like that. We don’t put people on it, any medication.
A lot of time the bacteria that causes periodontal disease, some of it can simply be killed by oxygen. It likes to live in a non-oxygen environment. So, just giving air to it sometimes kills some of these bacteria. Sometimes you need a little bit more. Sometimes the bacteria are a little nastier and it needs a little bit more help to go away. But, like I say, it’s very easily treated.
Shelby Township Dentist discusses Periodontal Disease
So if you have any questions about periodontal disease in Shelby Township or if you want to be screened to see if you have any periodontal disease, please give our office a call and we can help you out to get on that road to health. At 248-652-0024.
