I HAVE been reading in the press about people linking their teeth falling out, or teeth chipping and turning grey, with having suffered from Covid-19.
Gum disease, which is the main reason teeth become loose and fall out, is a silent disease; it’s not sore until the very end stage. Every week I discover gum disease in a patient’s mouth who had literally no idea that they had the disease. I show them the bone loss on the X-ray, the loose tooth in their mouth or the swollen purple gum around the tooth to demonstrate that the disease actually exists.
When it comes to body health, in general, people believe that they have a disease if they can see it, feel it, touch it, taste it, hear it or smell it – unfortunately there are many diseases that are completely silent, sometimes for decades, before our senses can pick them up.
Bleeding is the typical sign of gum issues in non-smokers. It is especially tricky for smokers to self-diagnose that they have gum disease as cigarettes shut down the blood vessels around teeth, So, a smoker’s gums don’t even bleed, giving a false sense of security.
Gum disease is the sixth most common disease in the world and 15 per cent of people suffer from gum disease in its most severe form which means we are highly likely to have teeth fall out in our hands. If we did a public poll pre-Covid and asked who had noticed that they had a loose tooth, a chipped tooth, a tooth that went grey in the past month, thousands of hands would go up.
Gum disease is caused by the immune system overreacting to oral bacteria and long-Covid sufferers do have an issue with their immune system so it is possible that dentists will start to see new atypical disease arise.
However, a lot more in-depth research would need to be done on oral problems before we could relate teeth falling out with long Covid.
