Dr. Erinne Kennedy is a dentist and the assistant dean of curriculum and integrated learning at Kansas City University College of Dental Medicine in Joplin.
She spoke about the bidirectional relationship between oral health and diabetes, and about some simple changes individuals can make to help manage their condition.
This month, we’re focusing on stories about the impact of diabetes.
Dr. Erinne Kennedy: So, what's really interesting about diabetes and oral health is it's one of the first chronic diseases where the literature showed really great oral health improves how you manage your chronic disease, and managing your chronic disease also improves your oral health status.
And so, anytime that you have diabetes, one of the first things that it does is it impacts your saliva.
And there's studies that look at type one and type two diabetics. It changes the quality or the makeup of your saliva, but oftentimes the medications also result in dry mouth.
And when you have a mouth that is drier than average, it impacts the bacteria that are in there or the pathogens.
So, I always explain to my students and my patients — there's good bacteria and there's not so good bacteria, and the goal is to have a balance between the not so good bacteria and the good bacteria in your mouths.
Because at the end of the day, those good bacteria are really good at preventing tooth decay, and so we have to find ways to build those up.
But the challenge for patients with type one and type two diabetes is that when you decrease your salivary flow, it typically increases the pH of your saliva and the bacteria that are there, and it creates a really yummy environment where those pathogens want to thrive.
And so, you'll see patients that are diagnosed with diabetes, and they actually end up having tooth decay.
The really challenging component to this is that you ask yourself the chicken or the egg question, right?
Did it come because they were eating maybe a lot of carbohydrate focused foods, and that was contributing to you know these pathogens surviving and thriving and causing tooth decay?
Or as they started to develop this chronic disease, did that impact their saliva and their ability to navigate and maintain homeostasis — did that change?
And sometimes we don't know the answer to that question, but we can modulate that. We can change that. We can make your microbiome better.
You can do things as simple as rinsing with baking soda a couple times a day, or dipping your toothbrush and your toothpaste in a little bit of baking soda.
You can snack on xylitol candies. You can pick these up at Aldi or your local grocery store, and those are super healthy and helpful for patients with diabetes.
And so, you know, you can also go down the route of having like oral probiotics and different things like that that you can come by that can help you modulate your microbiome. But I'm in a rural area; those are sometimes hard to come by at Walmart.
So, I always tell my patients you can do the exact same thing by dipping your toothpaste in baking soda.
You can do the exact same thing by snacking on sunflower seeds because they have arginine in them, and that's super healthy for your microbiome and great for your blood sugar.
So, I always like to think simple is better. You can get really complex when you think about preventive oral healthcare, but I think when you focus on simple solutions that are easy to build as a part of your natural routine, it makes navigating your chronic conditions seem effortless.
