What if someone told you that your health problems might be solved by going to the dentist? Would you believe them? It’s absolutely true, says Dr. Lisa Marie Samaha, a Newport News dentist who for decades has been urging others to understand the direct correlation between good dental health and overall wellness.
She’s done it through her practice, Port Warwick Dental Arts. She’s done it through the teaching and research institute she founded. And for the past year, she’s been pushing an initiative to raise awareness across the community and to other medical practitioners.
“The medical crisis is in our mouths,” says Samaha, who has published world-wide on the topic. “In the past 34 years, I’ve watched people come into my office—they’re not just sick dentally, they’re sick physically. Through proper evaluation and collaboration with their medical teams, we can literally transform their lives.”
Decades of scientific research have connected periodontal disease with other diseases, including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, stroke, kidney and lung disease, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, infertility, erectile dysfunction, preterm birth and other complications during pregnancy.
Samaha has numerous patient case studies from those who had dental work done and found their overall health improved as a result. Take Ellyn Tilburg, a retired Newport News teacher. She was supposed to have abdominal surgery last summer, but a day be-fore surgery, she saw Samaha, who advised her against the procedure because of serious infections in her mouth.
Because Tilburg’s blood was already carrying a significant level of infection from den-tal disease, Samaha’s concern was that surgery could cause the infection to spread. The surgeon agreed to cancel surgery, and Tilburg instead got work done on her mouth. To her surprise, after dental treatment, her whole body began feeling stronger.
Over five months, she lost 25 pounds. Her looks changed—clearly evident in before and after photos.
“People have remarked that my eyes look different, my skin tone looks different,” says Tilburg, who is 65. “I have an increase in energy. For the first time, my body is well, and it’s getting better and better.”
The connection between oral health and the rest of the body isn’t just anecdotal, Sama-ha says— there’s hard science behind it. The connection was affirmed in 1996 by dental researchers Genco and Offenbacher, who revealed the results of their work to the American Academy of Periodontology. Since then, all of the United States surgeon generals have acknowledged the connection in their reports on Oral Health in America, published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “The mouth can be-come a source of disease or pathological processes affecting other parts of the body,” former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher wrote in his report in 2000. Medical research has made great strides over the past century in helping people improve their oral health. Once upon a time, most Americans could expect to lose their teeth by mid-dle age.
“Technology for the early diagnosis of disease and the repair of teeth, as well as bond-ing resins, new life-like porcelains, dental implants and dental lasers have revolutionized dentistry, making it safer, gentler and more efficient and effective than ever—even painless in most circumstances,” Samaha says.
Dentists can use the face and mouth as a mirror of health, reflecting disease in other parts of the body. Oral tissues can indicate a wide range of diseases, such as chicken pox, mononucleosis, even HIV. Vitamin deficiencies often are first manifest in the mouth, where bacteria aggressively attack the delicate, soft tissue there. Basically, the mouth can serve as a warning system—that something else is going on.
More than 500 bacterial strains have been identified in dental biofilm, which is basically the plaque that forms on surfaces in the mouth. Biofilms form throughout the body, but are usually sloughed off in some way. Not so in the mouth—the biofilm on the teeth only goes away with proper daily cleansing and professional care, Samaha says. If the biofilm isn’t cleaned away regularly, bacteria can grow and get into infectedgum tissue. From there, it can migrate throughout the bloodstream, attacking every tissue in the body.
More than 80 percent of the adult population in the United States has some level of per-iodontal disease, a chronic inflammatory, infectious disease that includes gingivitis and periodontitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Yet, Samaha says, the ma-jority of all periodontal disease is undiagnosed and untreated. Left untreated, periodon-tal disease can encourage and complicate other diseases in the body.
“There is a direct link between periodontal disease and nearly all of the organ systems in our body,” Samaha says. “Bleeding gums allow for dangerous periodontal bacteria to invade the bloodstream and set up inflammation and disease throughout t