According to the Research Trisha E. O’Hehir, RDH, BS
Editorial Director, Hygienetown Magazine

The ultimate and undesirable outcome of periodontal disease is tooth loss. As a scare tactic, tooth loss should encourage people to accept treatment and motivate them to take better care of their teeth and gums. Personally, I didn’t have much luck using fear of tooth loss to motivate my patients. Periodontitis leads to tooth loss – eventually. It’s the truth, but in reality, only for a small percentage of cases. I found it frustrating to talk to people about the risk of tooth loss when in fact very few of my patients were actually losing any teeth. Sure, some did, but not very many. It took me a while, but I finally figured out that tooth loss didn’t always happen to those with periodontal disease and therefore was not a very good motivator.

Instead, I began explaining, “If you see bleeding, bacteria and toxins are entering your blood stream.” Now that got their attention! When I started doing this in the early 1980s, there was no research linking periodontal disease to heart disease; preterm, low birth weight babies; lung disease; or ulcers. We had only a few studies demonstrating a link between diabetes and periodontal disease and the influence of pregnancy hormones on bacteria causing gingivitis. I was going out on a limb, but it made sense to me. I didn’t want bacteria and their toxic waste floating around in my blood stream, and I didn’t think others would either.

The information about toxins in the blood stream taking the infection to other parts of the body had a greater impact and resulted in better compliance with periodontal therapy and oral health measures than talking about tooth loss.

We now have research that confirms the obvious – a connection does exist between the mouth and the rest of the body. With this information, oral health education takes on a new dimension that patients understand. We still can’t say gum disease causes heart problems, premature births, babies with low birth weights, lung infections, or ulcers, but we can explain that allowing bacteria and toxins to enter the blood stream is not a healthy thing to do.