Gum Disease Can Lead To Tongue Cancer

A serious case of periodontitis or gum disease can cause you to lose teeth and can destroy the bone in your jaw that holds your teeth in place.

But there’s even worse news. Let the periodontitis go on too long, and it quintuples your chances of tongue cancer for every millimeter of bone lost in the jaw. Astudy at the at the University at Buffalo and Roswell Park Cancer Institute shows that gum disease and tongue cancer are closely linked.

“We expected to see an association, given the results of earlier studies linking chronic infections and inflammation to cancer risk in other organs,” says researcher Mine Tezal, “but we didn’t expect to see such a clear association with a relatively small sample size.”

Tezal and other scientists compared the gums of about 50 men with tongue cancer to the mouths of 50 men without cancer.

“Periodontitis is a chronic disease that progresses very slowly,” Tezal says. “Seeing alveolar bone loss on X-rays indicates the infection has existed for decades, making it clear that periodontitis preceded the cancer diagnosis…”