Dentists in clinical practice can expect a higher prevalence of periodontal disease among obese adults, although the evidence pointing to a direct link between obesity and periodontal disease is limited, according to a new study in the Journal of Periodontology (December 2010, Vol. 81:12, pp. 1708-1724).
Study author Benjamin Chaffee, a graduate student in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and Scott Weston, DDS, who has a private practice in Santa Cruz, CA, did a meta-analysis of epidemiologic studies to determine the evidence of an obesity-periodontal disease relationship.
They conducted searches of Medline, Scopus, BIOSIS, Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences (LILACS), Cochrane Library, and Brazilian Bibliography of Dentistry databases and looked at 70 relevant studies.
Among their findings:
- 41 studies suggested a positive association.
- Summary estimates suggested a greater mean clinical attachment loss among obese individuals, a higher mean body mass index (BMI) among periodontal patients, and a trend of increasing odds of prevalent periodontal disease with increasing BMI.
"This positive association was consistent and coherent with a biologically plausible role for obesity in the development of periodontal disease," the authors concluded. "However, with few quality longitudinal studies, there is an inability to distinguish the temporal ordering of events, thus limiting the evidence that obesity is a risk factor for periodontal disease or that periodontitis might increase the risk of weight gain."
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