GENETIC CLASSIFICATION OF GUM DISEASES 🔍

The study, published in the Journal of Dental Research, offers a classification system for periodontal diseases that will allow detecting and treating diseases before they cause serious harm to the patient.

🎓 Scientists propose a new classification system for gum diseases, the first of its kind, based on genetic changes, instead of the current classification system based on the clinical symptoms of the disease.

According to them, such a system will allow detecting gum diseases much earlier, which means eliminating the problem in a timely manner, applying an individual approach to the patient and preventing the development of severe symptoms and tooth loss ‼

The current system, based on clinical symptoms, divides periodontitis into “chronic” and “aggressive”, depending on the degree of swelling of the gums and the frequency of tooth loss.

However, such a classification is flawed, according to Professor Panos N. Papapanou, the lead author of the study.

“There are many cases that can be attributed to both groups. Many patients with severe symptoms can be effectively treated, but other patients with seemingly less severe manifestations of infection, despite treatment, continue to lose their teeth” ©

The researchers analyzed the genome of 120 patients with gum disease, aged 11 to 76 years, with a diagnosis of either chronic or aggressive periodontitis.

They found that all patients were divided into 2 groups based on genetic markers.

The first group corresponded to the clinical group of chronic periodontitis;

The second was in the clinical group of aggressive periodontitis, but the match was incomplete.

In some patients, the type of periodontitis exposed on the basis of genetic analysis did not correspond to the clinical classification of this disease.

Patients in the second group had more serious gum lesions. In addition, these patients had a higher level of infection with pathogenic microorganisms in the oral cavity, compared with the first group.

And this distribution corresponded to our ideas about severe gum diseases — that they occur more often in men than in women 🧐

Genetic research can now become the basis of a new system of classification of gum diseases.

This analysis will allow to identify patients with a severe form of gum disease at a stage when a sufficient number of clinical signs have not yet accumulated to make a diagnosis according to the existing classification.

The professor explains: “If the patient is very susceptible to severe periodontitis, we could use more aggressive methods of therapy, despite the fact that there are few external manifestations of the disease at the time of examination.”

The professor and his team of scientists now want to conduct a study in which they use a new classification system on a large group of patients to analyze how sensitive this new method is in relation to predicting disease outcomes.

✔ Translation of the study specifically for TirusWellnes.