The Silent Disease Behind Tooth Loss

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:01]Hi everyone. Today we're going to talk about perodontal disease. Parodontal disease is the number one reason why patients come and see us. So let's talk about the different steps. So here is a healthy mouth, a healthy jawbone and cross-section. The gum area has a non-attached area called the sulcus.

[00:00:19]This is normal for all of us. It's about 1 to 2 mm for everybody. And normal brushing will clean this sulcus area for us. When we are optimally cleaning, there is no accumulation of anything inside that little pocket. But when we start having disease infiltration and plaque and calculus buildup into this pocket, we start getting an inflammation that we can't reduce. And this is where the gum tissue swells. So it actually swells up. So the pocket becomes deeper and more unclansible. As we can see on this here, periodontal fibers are the natural shock absorber that take the shock from the tooth area to the bone and make sure that those forces are optimal. Early stages of perodontal disease are something called gingivitis which is an inflammation of the gum and it can be for all kinds of reasons like catching it with a toothbrush, it'll get inflamed or there's accumulation of food that's not being cleaned properly. Now depending on the stage of perodontal disease it is there are four stages as we're going through here. This is mild perodontitis. This is early in the process. This needs early diagnosis and intervention by your clinical professional. So your dentist will spot it and probably recommend a better cleaning regime or send you over to the hygienist. Moderate parodontitis creates pockets up to about four, five or 6 millm that can still be treated by a hygienist by doing deep root planing and scaling which some of you will already have experienced and then severe perodontitis. This is when the breakdown starts accelerating. The way to correct this is to do a surgical intervention by actively opening up the gum root planing. As we then advance to stage four parodontitis which is a lot of bone loss but also we start getting tooth movements. Once we have tooth movements the tooth itself is no longer stable and the bone can no longer regenerate and it just keeps wasting away and then as some of you know this will end up with you losing teeth. So if we look at it big picture here, we will see we need this jawbone to maintain the shape and functionality of not only the mouth but the face shape too. Those forces from chewing as you can see are dissipated from the crown of the tooth which is made out of this really hard substance called enamel. When we lose teeth in the area where we have lost teeth, we lose bone. As you can see the teeth on either side start drifting inwards. This is bone resorption. Once we start having bone resorption, wearing dentures will actually accelerate this process because every time you chew with dentures, what it's doing is it's compressing the blood supply to the bone. So, we end up losing more and more and more bone. We then start reducing the actual closing ability as we lose more and more and more bone. And if we lose all our teeth, it prematurely ages us. as you some of you wearing full dentures or large partial dentures will know happens when you take your dentures out. So for us it's really important to see the further effects in a healthy tooth. We have these healthy parodontal fibers and the fibers act like a sealed door. So they stop things from going down when they are healthy. Remember, you've got lots of antibodies in your saliva working together. The problem when it enters the bloodstream is where it can go, which is pretty much everywhere because we know this from the clinical research that's out there that it can reach the heart and the brain because there are direct links between parodontal disease, cardiac disease, and even dementia. So this should be able to help you visualize why we treat advanced perodontal disease in particular with our solution which is clearing everything out the entire environment for good health when we put the implants in and then having the engineered prosthetic space so we never have these areas where we are going to have accumulations that cannot be managed easily by patients. We stop the bone loss with our process. The annual screening that you come to every 12 months tells us that your past perodontal disease is not to be seen again. I hope this has been useful.

[00:04:39]Thank you very much.