Unlocking the Power of Your Mouth: The Gateway to Your Body's Vitality
The relationship between your mouth and body is vital to overall wellness.
The oral-systemic relationship explains how bacteria that live in your mouth and around your teeth can cause tooth decay, and inflammation of the gums, also called gingivitis, and, when it gets worse, leads to bone loss and a more advanced disease called periodontitis. The oral-systemic link describes how these conditions may impact your entire body (and vice versa).
The oral cavity is the first place for the colonization of human bacteria, known as the microbiome, which then spreads farther down the digestive system. It may seem counterintuitive, but the bacteria in your digestive system can affect the health of your gums and teeth.
In an evaluation of swallowing frequency, Lear et al. found in 1965 that people swallow 585 times a day (0.14–0.7/min). Rudney et al. 1995 said that healthy people swallow 18–400 times per hour (0.3–6.7/min). (Varies by age, causes, and co-morbidities). Keeping this in mind is crucial to ensuring that the bacteria colonies in your mouth are balanced and that the "bad guys" are under control; what occurs in your mouth will wind up in your system.
The mouth-body relationship also highlights the problems that arise when insufficient oxygen exists. Sleep problems, mouth breathing, snoring, signs of sleep apnea, and a stuffy nose might all originate in the mouth.
There is a possibility that an oxygen deficiency in your body may manifest itself first in your dental health, indicating an imbalance in the oral-systemic relationship.
The state of your teeth and gums is the foundation for the health of the rest of your body. Your dental health serves as the basis for everything else in your body.
More and more evidence shows that periodontal pathogens affect overall health, both directly and indirectly. Studies have shown the link between inflammation caused by periodontal disease and systemic disease, which is often overlooked (Bui et al., 2019). Moreover, periodontitis changes from a mild, localized infectious disease to a chronic, generalized, hyper-inflammatory condition that could be life-threatening.
Over the past few years, multiple academic and clinical studies have linked periodontitis to systemic inflammatory diseases, such as arthritis, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and atherosclerosis (de Molon et al., 2019). The conditions above looked at these connections' for viral, molecular, and physiological reasons. There is also a connection between the onset and progression of some diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal and colorectal cancer, diabetes and insulin resistance, Alzheimer's disease, respiratory tract infections, and poor pregnancy outcomes, to name a few (Bui et al., 2019; Khumaedi et al., 2019).
The main goal is to keep talking about all the different parts of oral disease so that we can lay the groundwork for studying, diagnosing, and treating this complicated systemic disease in an integrated way.
