2. The Goals Of Treatment For Periodontal Disease

In topic #1, what peri­odon­tal dis­ease and gin­givi­tis are, what the dif­fer­ence between the two con­di­tions is and some other aspects of peri­odon­tal dis­ease were dis­cussed. Imag­ine that you are in your dentist’s office, have been told you have peri­odon­tal dis­ease and it needs to be treated. Do you know what treat­ing peri­odon­tal dis­ease or gin­givi­tis means? Is it just sim­ply a clean­ing or is there more to its treatment?

To under­stand treat­ment of peri­odon­tal dis­ease or gin­givi­tis, one must under­stand at least some aspects of the con­di­tions being treated. I will con­fine my com­ments to peri­odon­tal dis­ease treat­ment because it is a more seri­ous con­di­tion than gin­givi­tis. There are many sim­i­lar­i­ties in the treat­ment of the two conditions.

In its most fre­quently found con­di­tion, peri­odon­tal dis­ease is a chronic dis­ease con­di­tion. That means the infec­tions for this dis­ease are low grade infec­tions, giv­ing no notice­able pain and can hap­pen over a period of many years. There are in many cases warn­ing signs, which may or may not be ignored. At the present time, the most com­mon bone loss asso­ci­ated with this dis­ease can not be recov­ered. The bone loss in some areas with cer­tain types of bone defects can be recov­ered to a cer­tain degree, how­ever in many areas, the bone loss is not recov­er­able. This dis­ease, like dia­betes can be con­trolled but not cured, if one thinks of a cure as in recov­er­ing all the bone and gum attach­ment lost to a level before any gum or bone loss started.

1. The goals of peri­odon­tal treat­ment are what it means to treat peri­odon­tal dis­ease. The goals are as follows:
2. To pre­vent peri­odon­tal dis­ease or catch it in its ear­li­est stages by increas­ing a person’s aware­ness of the dis­ease itself and it’s warn­ing signs.
3. To stop peri­odon­tal dis­ease progression.
4. To reduce the risk of future peri­odon­tal dis­ease progression.
5. To remove the cause of peri­odon­tal disease.
6. To remove or reduce the risk fac­tors con­tribut­ing to the pro­gres­sion of peri­odon­tal dis­ease when ever possible.
7. To reverse the effects of past peri­odon­tal dis­ease as much as pos­si­ble with avail­able treatments.
8. To pre­pare the mouth for other types of needed den­tal treat­ment so that the other types of den­tal treat­ment will last as long as pos­si­ble and will be of the high­est qual­ity possible.

Obvi­ously a sim­ple clean­ing by itself will not ade­quately treat peri­odon­tal dis­ease. In the topic #3, we will dis­cuss how the goals of peri­odon­tal treat­ment are achieved.