Diagnosing Gum Diseases for Oral Hygiene

Video Transcript

Hi I’m Dr. Scott Chandler with Silver Creek Dental on behalf of Expert Village.com. In this clip we are going to talk about how to diagnose your periodontal condition. Someone with a really healthy mouth that you are brushing and flossing every day tends to not have any gum disease problems. Now if you are brushing and flossing and your gums are bleeding a little bit, then you may have a little bit of early periodontal disease or gingivitis. The first step of periodontal disease is called gingivitis. Here we’ve got a picture of a healthy tooth. This is the bone, there’s the tooth, some ligaments that surround it. Your dentist will use some little tool called the periodontal probe to measure the pockets of your gums to see if they are healthy. If they probe one to two millimeters and don’t bleed, then you’ve a pretty healthy mouth. You go to the next page here and you can see that probe is going a little bit deeper. Those gums are kind of red and inflamed. That’s where gingivitis sets in. When you brush and floss and they bleed a little bit and you know you’ve got a little gingivitis, it’s time to step up the home care a little and probably go in and get your teeth cleaned with your dentist. Now as that continues to progress that disease, you get on to early periodontist. What happens now that inflammation and irritation from those gums starts to eat the bone away around the teeth. So you can see where that bone is being eaten away around those teeth. Pretty scary stuff. That calculus and a lot you know as tartar, builds up underneath the gums around those teeth and that causes this condition. So once it gets to that point, only your dental professional can get that clean and get you back on the road to health. Now if things progress and you are just not getting that taken care of, pretty soon you will move into moderate periodontal disease. Now you can see as that progresses, those pockets that we are measuring get very deep and as they get down 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 millimeters deep, you’ve got a real problem. What that is measuring is this bone loss and those pockets will kind of follow that bone loss. As you have that bone loss, which is what is anchoring those teeth in is that jaw bone. So this is irreversible bone damage. So if you are getting the moderate periodontal disease and you are starting to lose a lot of bone, your teeth may start to loosen up a little bit and you will feel them get a little wiggly and you tend to have some pretty swollen red and tender gums. It’s not a good situation. Let’s get it taken care of before you get to that point. So if you look in your mouth and you see something like this where you’ve got a lot of root showing and those gums have receded back and you got a lot of brown around the teeth or around the edges and that sort of thing, you might be in a serious condition with your gum disease. You need to get that taken care of because there is a lot of research out there recently that shows the inflammation caused by this gum disease is one of the primary factors in causing your first heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, low birth weight, pre-term babies, just a lot of stuff that you just don’t want to go there. Get into your dentists and go ahead and get these teeth cleaned up. If you notice any type of swelling or bleeding around your gums or its just been a while since you’ve been in, that’s how you diagnose your own gum disease. Go get it taken care of.

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