What is gum disease?

2 Feb

Sarah Diederich our Periodontist at The Implant Centre, outlines what gum disease is. Gum disease when left untreated is one of the biggest causes of tooth loss and bad breath - the smell of rotting flesh.

Gum disease is a condition where plaque will eat away at the attachment of the gum to the tooth, and eventually, you will get some bone loss around the tooth, giving you less support for the tissues around the tooth. If this is the tooth and this is the gum, the gum will start to peel away from the tooth and the plaque will go down the side of the tooth and start to eat away at the attachment of the gum to the tooth, to form what we refer to as a pocket.
And the deeper the pocket, the more attachment losses occur and the worse the gum disease is. The bone loss tends not to be reversible. So, if we do not treat the gum disease, you may end up losing the teeth because there is such little bone and gum support around the teeth. What we're trying to do is stabilise the condition and prevent further bone loss from occurring.