Diabetes and Your Dental Health

While we may not realize it, dental health is linked to so many other health areas in our lives. In fact, dental health can often be a precursor to health problems that are lurking underneath the surface, or other health problems can lead to bad dental health. It’s a give and take for many diseases.

For example, one of those health issues that is often linked with dental health is diabetes.

Diabetes affects your body’s ability to process sugar in a healthy way, and since sugar is used to make energy, this can result in a myriad of issues for you body. You can get symptoms ranging from excessive thirst and hunger, weight loss or gain, nausea, fatigue, faintness, etc. Diabetes affects about 29 million people in America today; that’s almost 10% of the population! And what’s interesting is that over 8 million people are living with diabetes and don’t know it.

How Diabetes Effects Your Dental Health

So what does diabetes have to do with dental health? Because diabetes can have symptoms in the mouth—such as excessive thirst and a lack of saliva, which causes gums to be inflamed and bleed often. You may have problems with tasting food or have serious infections in your mouth that last longer than they should. And you’re at a higher risk for cavities.

Long-term, diabetes can cause periodontal gum disease that can destroy your gums. Periodontal gum disease can cause pain, bad breath, chewing difficulties, tooth loss, and fungal infections like thrush.

But good news! Your dentist can help alleviate these problems and ensure that you can retain dental health even if you have diabetes. If you have diabetes, it’s really important to get your teeth and mouth checked on a regular basis by a dentist to ensure that these issues don’t escalate.

Research has shown that treating the mouth and being proactive about gum disease can actually help blood sugar in patients who are struggling with diabetes, and this can decrease the progression of the disease. So a healthy mouth can correlate to having more control over diabetes, and vice versa.

Bottom line: If you have diabetes, take extra care of your mouth!

Dentists can also help spot early onset diabetes through some of these symptoms—so even if you don’t think you have diabetes but have strange mouth dryness or infections, you may want to get yourself checked out by a dentist to ensure that you catch diabetes and maintain control.

As always, Victory Dental is here to answer any question you may have about diabetes and mouth health. We’ll walk you through any health concerns you may have and help find a solution for you.