Video Transcript
Hi my name is Michael. I’m one of the dentists at Fullarton Park Dental, and I thought I’d do a little video today on something we occasionally discuss with patients or often in fact discuss with patients. And we’re amazed and interested in how little people actually know about it, and that’s the connection between your mouth and gum disease and the rest of your body.
So you and your overall health. So your gums and your mouth are, they’re just merely part of the rest of your body, so if you’ve got infection and disease and problems in your mouth, it doesn’t just stay there. The bacteria in your mouth will then get into your blood stream in the little pocket between the gum and the tooth.
And they can then flow around your body and your bloodstream and they can colonise elsewhere in your body which is really bad news because the bacteria are no good, the type that are in your mouth if you’ve got that gum disease there, and they can start to cause troubles elsewhere.
So the science tells us that if you’ve got disease and infected mouth, that your risk of heart disease is about two and bit times as much. So your risk of heart attack goes up by twice. And your risk of stroke is 3.7 times as high if you’ve got infection in your mouth.
So when you come to the dentist to have your teeth checked and cleaned and looked after, you’re not just looking after your teeth. You’re really helping your overall well-being as well and making sure the rest of you is healthy as well.
One of the best things you can do to in fact reduce your risk of heart attack and stroke is to make sure that your teeth are very healthy and your mouth is very healthy. I should say as well though that that’s controlling for all other factors as well, so that’s not someone who’s a smoker and someone who’s not.
That’s basically if you’ve got a clone of yourself, and one of you has a nice healthy mouth and the other one doesn’t, the risk of heart attack is twice as much for the one who doesn’t have a healthy mouth, and your stroke is 3.7 times as high.
So if you were ever unsure about whether you should be coming in and getting your mouth looked after or looking after at home, that should give you another reason to make sure you keep your mouth in tip-top shape because a healthy mouth goes a long way to making sure you’ve got a healthy rest of your body as well.
There’s a really strong link, if you type into Google gum disease heart disease, you’ll come up with a whole lot of articles, scholarly articles, proper scientific articles, on the links between the two. So if there’s any other questions, by all means let us know.
We’re happy to help out, so give the surgery a call on 8272 5271 or leave a comment below. If you feel like this article would be helpful, or this video I should say, would be helpful for other people, by all means tag them below.
We’re happy to help out. So we’ll see you at your next visit, take care, bye.
