Presence of decayed, filled, missing teeth linked to stroke risk
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Key takeaways:
- Having decayed, filled and/or missing teeth was tied to increased risk for stroke and death.
- Risk was especially high among Black individuals compared with white individuals.
The presence of decayed, filled and missing teeth was associated with increased risk for stroke and death, especially among Black participants vs. white participants in the ARIC study, according to a subanalysis published in Stroke.
“Dental caries is a highly prevalent disease worldwide, ranking as the most common health condition according to the Global Burden of Disease in 2019, with 2 billion of the 3.5 billion people who experience oral diseases having dental caries of permanent teeth. A recent update in the U.S. population reports that [more than one in five] adults have untreated dental caries,” Souvik Sen, MD, MS, MPH, clinical professor and chair of the department of neurology at the University of South Carolina, and colleagues wrote. “It has been reported that regular dental care use was associated with 23% lower rates of ischemic stroke compared with episodic dental care users. Additionally, we propose to test whether regular dental care use will be associated with lower levels of dental caries compared with episodic dental care use.”
Image: Adobe Stock
Sen and colleagues used incident ischemic stroke, CHD event and all-cause mortality data from 6,351 participants in the dental cohort of the ARIC study. A full-mouth dental examination was conducted at visit four of the ARIC study. The researchers evaluated the association between decayed, missing and filled tooth surfaces due to dental caries and stroke, CHD events and mortality.
Sen and colleagues reported that presence of one or more dental caries was associated with increased risk for stroke (adjusted HR = 1.4; 95% CI, 1.1-1.79) and death (aHR = 1.13; 95% CI, 1.01-1.26) but not CHD events (aHR = 1.13; 95% CI, 0.93-1.37) compared with no caries.
Moreover, the association between dental caries and incident ischemic stroke and all-cause mortality was stronger among Black participants (HR for stroke = 2.89; 95% CI, 1.82-4.59; HR for all-cause mortality = 1.54; 95% CI, 1.39-1.89) compared with white participants (HR for stroke = 0.96; 95% CI, 0.67-1.38; P for interaction = .0001; HR for all-cause mortality = 1.2; 95% CI, 1.05-1.37; P for interaction = .03).
“We think that this may be one of the first studies to evaluate the association between dental caries and incident ischemic stroke within a large U.S. community-based cohort,” the researchers wrote. “Regular dental use is associated with lower levels of dental caries, suggesting that it may be a means of lowering this risk for incident ischemic stroke.”
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