Dr. Greg Davis: For WKY News, I’m Dr. Greg Davis on medicine. Dr. Jeff Ebersole is Associate Dean for Research in Graduate Studies at the College of Dentistry at the University of Kentucky as well as Director for Oral Health Research. Jeff one of your major areas of research is the fact that oral disease, diseases that involve diseases that involve the mouth are not limited to the oral cavity, can you expand on that a little bit?
Dr. Jeff Ebersole: Sure, glad to be here, hopefully provide you with some information on this because it really is a critical question and in particular for the population of Kentucky that has some of the worst oral health in country and it effects all ages, from the youngest children where 50% of our children have early childhood carries when they’re under 2 or 3 years of age, up through our elderly in which we have the highest edentialism rate in the country. What as occurred over about the past 15 years is a better recognition and understanding that chronic infections and the one we deal with is in the oral cavity, periodontal disease or gum disease as it’s commonly known is an infection and it probably is one of the most widespread infections throughout mankind including developed countries like the US. Previously the dentist sort of focus their research on the disease in the oral cavity and the physician sort of focused their research on the rest of the body. Well what’s happened over the past decade or so is a recognition that these two are intimately linked which doesn’t necessarily take nuclear science to figure out and that having an infection in your mouth, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and people with gum disease that leave it untreated to the point where they would actually lose their teeth from that is literally like having a wound, an open wound about the size of the palm of your hand and people don’t think about that and they accept, the population accepts that they’ll have this disease because their parents had this disease and eventually they’ll have all their teeth pulled. Well what we now know and we continue to gather data is this infection actually affects the rest of the body. So we have some interesting epidemiologic information and even biologic now mechanisms linking poor oral health is chronic infection to diabetes and secondary outcomes of diabetes to cardiovascular risk as another inflammatory disease and preterm low birth weight infants. The idea that if an expectant mother during that nine months of pregnancy has this chronic infection in her mouth, the bacteria from the mouth are actually getting into the blood stream, we know that for a fact. The data now suggests that those bacteria can end up lodging in the placenta, can actually infect the fetus and effect the development of the fetus and change the time of birth so that the fetuses are actually born for a low gestational age or what’s called pre term birth. What we’ve been doing is trying to focus on human studies, we’ve just completed a multi center randomized control trial where we actually went in and treated expectant moms with periodontal disease to see if we could lower preterm low birth weight outcomes in those pregnancies and we have a study ongoing with some of our outreach activities with Madisonville, The Trover Clinic in Madisonville in which we’re linking improving oral health in pregnant moms with a new concept of group prenatal care, it’s called “Centering Pregnancy” and it’s a really neat activity that’s going on now and we’re probably the only place in the nation that is actually doing this kind of activity.
Dr. Greg Davis: Dr. Jeff Ebersole thank you very much for speaking with us today.
Dr. Jeff Ebersole: Glad to be here, thank you.
Dr. Greg Davis: For WKY News, I’m Dr. Greg Davis.