Relationship Between Dental Care And Overall Health Studied

Providing extra gum care also may help patients with rheumatoid arthritis who also have gum disease, according to a team led by M. de Noronha Pinho of the Pontifical Catholic University in Brazil.

The Pinho team studied 60 patients who had gum disease, rheumatoid arthritis, or both, and 15 healthy control group members. When the researchers compared patients with rheumatoid arthritis and gum disease who received extra periodontal care with comparable patients who received no extra gum care, “large reductions were noted in the groups treated in all the parameters (periodontal, systemic and specific RA tests),” the researchers write in their paper. “This result suggests the necessity of patients with RA to receive periodontal treatment.”

The number of patients in the study was too small to prove that treating gum disease can help ease a patient’s rheumatoid arthritis symptoms, but the results suggest the necessity of making sure that patients who have both rheumatoid arthritis and gum disease get treatment for their gum disease, the researchers write.

Researchers have reported mixed results in papers on studies involving efforts to treat gum disease in pregnant women, to keep inflammation from causing the women to give birth too early.

In February, for example, a team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis reported in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology that treating gum disease with active scaling and root planning did not seem to reduce the risk of preterm birth for 378 pregnant women in a group they studied, and that active treatment of gum disease might have increased the risk of preterm birth for those women.

But 4 researchers from that same Washington University team have conducted a second study that suggests that some gum care might be more effective at reducing the risk of preterm birth than other gum care. These researchers–M. Jeffcott, S. Parry, M. Sammel and G. Macones–looked at whether gum treatments actually seemed to work.

Only 7.2% of all the women in the study without any serious gum disease gave birth before their pregnancies had lasted 35 weeks. For patients with gum disease, the preterm birth rate was about 23%.

When gum disease treatments worked, the women who were treated were significantly more likely to carry their pregnancies to term than women who also were treated but had cases of gum disease that failed to improve, the researchers found, according to a summary of an abstract the researchers presented in March in Washington, at the annual meeting of the American Association for Dental Research, Alexandria, Va.

Last summer, J.M. Goodson of the Forsyth Institute, Boston, and colleagues raised the possibility in an article in the Journal of Dental Research that a form of bacteria associated with gum disease, Selenomonas noxia, might cause obesity, or that obesity might cause gum disease by leading Selenomonas noxia to flourish, or both. The researchers found, for example, that more than 98% of obese women studied had unusually high concentrations of the Selenomonas noxia bacteria in their saliva.