The Inflammation Triad: Airway

0: 00 We’re Exposed to Toxins Everyday
1:15 How Dangerous is The Mouth?
3:36 Periodontal Treatment is Vital
8: 01 How Do We Develop Periodontal Disease?
10:18 Myths About Periodontal Disease

There are so many things that are toxic to us, but yet we're allowing ourselves to be exposed every day and then not testing for some of the things there that can be tested for. We first need to remove the toxins, but that's not good enough.

Let's look at how dangerous the mouth is. In fact, oral cancer ranks as the 13th most common cancer worldwide. And so we have to understand that many of these triggers of causation are from the oral bacteria.

Oral bacteria can actually cross the placental barrier. And so they are named in many things like infertility, intrauterine infections, preterm birth, low term birth rate, and unfortunately, even fetal death.

How about brain health? Dr. Pritchard explained that vascularly, how that can cross over, but these oral pathogens have been deeply studied and shown to kill off brain cells. They help in the creation of those amyloid plaques and they can even induce brain inflammation.

All of us should be well versed in diabetes and insulin resistance because of the statistic around this. It's very startling that if you have been diagnosed with diabetes, you're about 90 percent more likely to get periodontal disease.

These are my five children. And I'm going to ask you, which one is a diabetic? I'm going to let you know from a mother's point of view. Yes, it's my little guy, my youngest there. He is a type one diabetic and it's really opened my eyes into this correlation of infection and inflammation.
But what I want dental colleagues to hear, and even my physicians and MDs, that just treating the periodontal disease, we don't even have to talk about how good the treatment is, just actually doing some level of treatment can help our diabetics, whether type one or type two, lower their A1Cs by 1%. That is more than many times what our lifestyle and diet can do. Also treating periodontal disease can decrease the related deaths by 21% and we will save an average diabetic patient about $5,000 a year.
Our airway to these pathogens to these plaques. Look at the highway there that is so easily accessible. And so we have all these statistics. You are 70% more likely to develop Alzheimer's if you've been struggling with any level of periodontal disease for 10 years or more.

95% of Americans with diabetes also have periodontal disease. We can increase our premature death rate by 12% higher risk. We've heard today how 50% of heart attacks and strokes are triggered by these oral pathogens. And as far as our fertility and infertility, we have a 7x increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Look what it resulted in lower medical costs for our diabetics, for coronary artery disease and our cerebral vascular disease. How big of a lower what I'm going to say lower costs and lower risk.

Let's look at risk first look at these percentages. They are from 29% here. all the way to 24%. This is a greater reduction than what many patients can get with medication. We need to be aware of that. How about the medical cost reduction? Look at these numbers. These are huge. We're talking double digits here, thousands of dollars. And look at the percentages.
You can have a huge impact on your patient's life because some of the most stressful things that we deal with are these inflammatory diseases, but the cost associated with that. So we can track this, that we're not only reducing risk, but reducing those health costs. Let's understand we're talking about early treatment. We have to look for disease early.

How do we even develop periodontal disease? I want you to understand this three step process that happens. The first thing is what we've been talking about. We have to get pathogens. They have to colonize. They have to show up. That is that first phase of dysbiosis.

Once we have the pathogens there, then they start the host response of this chronic inflammatory response. That response doesn't go away. It is called chronic inflammation. All these inflammatory processes that we're talking about, that inflammatory process then ignites that bone loss. It's actually attacking itself because we don't stop the inflammatory process and that byproduct is we lose bone.

We lose bone in the jaw and mainly around the teeth. When that happens, we call it periodontal disease because that's the name of when you have bone loss. So how do you actually get these pathogens? I want you to understand the bacterial shift to health, to dysbiosis. And so as you're looking here in "healthy", we have these early colonizers. All these in this green section are called early colonizers or considered healthy species. It's not until they are not removed on a regular basis and have to start over.

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