"The major health risks of gum disease"

Why gum disease is a threat to your well-being

Just as skin prevents bacteria from entering your body, healthy gum tissue acts as a barrier, preventing bacteria from entering your body. When bacteria destroy gum tissue, as the case in gum disease, the barrier is no longer effective.

Bacteria now have a direct route into your body! Bacteria and their toxins enter damaged blood vessels that run through your gums. Once inside these vessels, they travel through your circulation where they are capable of causing more severe health problems including:

Premature Pregnancies:
Recent research has shown that mothers with periodontal disease are seven times more likely to deliver preterm, low birth weight infants. This finding reinforces well documented observations that infections during pregnancy increase the risk of premature births.

Genital and urinary tract infections, for instance, dramatically increase a woman's chance of delivering a premature infant. Like genital and urinary tract infections, gum disease represents a bacterial infection of the body. A woman considering pregnancy should visit her dentist to treat gum disease before pregnancy starts.

Stroke and Heart Attacks:
An ever-growing body of research links advanced gum disease and the occurrence of heart attacks and strokes. In studies conducted in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, and Germany, researchers found that people with advanced gum disease also had a 25% to 100% increased risk of suffering from a heart attack than those without advanced gum disease. A similar relationship exists between advanced gum disease and the development of strokes.

Theories for the increased risk of heart attack and stroke include:

• Potential ability of certain bacteria to trigger the clumping of platelets, forming blood clots. These blood clots, in turn, could block arteries to the heart, leading to a heart attack, or block arteries in the brain, leading to a stroke.

• Inflammatory molecules, produced to fight off the bacterial invaders, over time, may begin to trigger atherosclerosis - a hardening and narrowing of the arteries that can trigger heart attacks and strokes.

• Bacteria alone may damage the lining of the blood vessels, an event which could also lead to atherosclerosis.

Next... We'll learn the simple things you can do to completely prevent gum disease