Understanding how periodontal disease negatively impacts your oral health can help you in the fight to prevent it. Here are the top 5 ways that gum deterioration puts your oral health at risk.
1. It Destroys Your Gum Health
The most direct and obvious impact of gum disease is on your gums themselves. Bleeding, swollen, and painful gum tissue, deep bacterial infections in your gums, and discoloration of the gums are all possible effects.
Gum infections and inflammations can spread to other parts of your body too, so that gum health has an impact on overall health. The earlier you treat it, the less damage it can do. Far better to treat gum disease in the gingivitis or pre-gingivitis stage than to wait for the more serious periodontitis to take hold!
2. It Lowers Your Gum Line
As gum tissue deteriorates, it also begins to recede. This definitely hurts the natural beauty of your smile, but more seriously, it exposes your tooth roots and puts your teeth at risk.
PST grafts are the latest technique used to restore a natural gum line height after periodontal disease has caused recession.
3. Gum Disease Puts Teeth At Risk
You can’t neatly separate gum health from tooth health because the one directly impacts the other.
As noted above, receded gums leave tooth roots badly exposed, which gives plaque and bacteria a chance to break in. That can mean tooth loss or a root canal surgery when it’s the roots that are attacked.
Plus, the presence of harmful bacteria on your gums means that they can easily migrate over to your teeth and cause cavities in any part of the tooth they touch.
4. It Threatens Underlying Bone Tissue
Often overlooked is the fact that diseased gums threaten even the bone tissue that lies below them on your alveolar ridge.
This is the part of the jawbone that teeth are lodged into. So when the infection spreads to the bone, it can cause teeth to come loose or even (eventually) fall out. In some cases, bone grafts may become necessary to repair the damage done.
5. It Gives You Bad Breath
Last but certainly not least is the fact that gum disease can give you chronically bad breath. In dental talk, that’s called “halitosis.”
The bacteria festering in your mouth give off a foul odor that will stay with you and continue to return even though you use mouthwash and breath mints. The underlying cause – gum disease, needs to be addressed rather than just finding ways to cover up the bad breath with another scent.
These are the five principal ways in which poor gum health can impact your entire oral health. And oral health, in turn, has major potential impacts on your overall body health.
To learn more about gum disease, how to prevent it, and how to effectively treat it, contact the gum experts at Ormond Beach Periodontics & Implant Dentistry today!