Heart disease is the leading cause of death among adults in the United States. Along with other factors, your heart health is tied directly to how you take care of your mouth, including brushing, flossing, and getting regular check-ups and cleanings.
Smile with Heart
Dr. Jill Wade of Stonebriar Smile Design has devoted a large amount of time in her dental practice focusing on wellness dentistry. Through her passionate pursuit, she created a program called “Smile with Heart” where she and her staff co-manages patient care by working in conjunction with physicians, functional medicine doctors, cardiologists, and other specialists in the medical community for well-rounded, comprehensive care for her patients.
“I love teeth, I think they’re great,” she says. “But when I started practicing this way and saving lives, it was a game-changer for me. I wasn’t just drilling on teeth, I was…educating people about what we were doing for them…really changing the outcome of their overall health and wellbeing.”
Heart disease has impacted so many lives and continues to do so every day. While doctors typically spend just a few hours studying dentistry during their training, Dr. Wade reveals that, during her dentistry training, she learned much more about medicine and medical history. She has also observed that dentists typically see patients more often than physicians do. Because of this, Dr. Wade believes that, as a dentist, she is able to “really influence people’s decisions and lifestyle changes” due to the trust she’s built with her patients.
Did you know that approximately every 40 seconds, someone in the U.S. will have a heart attack, and every 34 seconds, someone dies from cardiovascular disease? Heart disease and strokes claimed more lives in 2021 than all cancers combined. And between 2019 and 2020, the direct and indirect costs of cardiovascular disease were $422 billion.
Dr. Wade has made it her personal mission to decrease those numbers and keep families from being devastated by this disease. She encourages people to make the investment in their dental health to help avoid the devastating costs—both monetary and otherwise—of having a heart attack.
Your Heart and Your Mouth: The Link Between Them
Health and beauty expert Laura Lewis-Edwards knows the danger of heart disease and how it affects not just those who suffer firsthand from the condition but the family as well. She shares that her “father had his first heart attack, which he survived, at the age of 40.” One factor which contributed to his condition was a very high-stress job, she tells us, and at the age of 78, he passed away due to continued heart issues. Sadly, her younger brother, who had his first triple-bypass when he was 37 years old, also passed away due to heart issues.
While it is unknown whether their oral health contributed to their heart condition, it is something that is invariably linked, one to the other—the official term of which is the “oral-systemic link.” Dr. Wade explains that this direct influence between the mouth and the “system” (of the body) is because the mouth is a highly vascular orifice, meaning it contains lots of blood vessels leading to the rest of the body, which impacts your arterial health.
When you visit Stonebriar Smile Design, we are going to help diagnose two things—neither of which your primary physician will diagnose—one is called periodontal disease, and the other is undiagnosed infections of the tooth or mouth. Periodontal disease has gone by many names: gingivitis, periodontal disease, or even “trench mouth.” As Dr. Wade explains, periodontal disease is a very aggressive type of bacteria that does not like oxygen, so it dives down into the pockets of your gums and deteriorates the bone, creating inflammation, redness, swelling, and bleeding.
“This is why some of these things are so important as cues in the mouth if you are brushing and flossing and bleeding, okay,” she warns. “It means those pockets down deep are not healthy.” As we’ve mentioned, the mouth is extremely vascular, so when you develop periodontal disease, it’s imperative to treat the whole mouth at the same time—called scaling and root cleaning, also known as “deep cleaning”—to disrupt the colony of the bacteria and prevent it from entering your bloodstream. This represents the “systemic” aspect of the oral-systemic link. Your body is made up of miles and miles of arterial vessels, and getting proper treatment will “temper down that amount of bacteria which is causing so much inflammation.”
Stonebriar Smile Design, in conjunction with their Smile with Heart program, will also diagnose other infections of the mouth or teeth, using cutting-edge diagnostic x-rays, which create two- and three-dimensional images, using cone beam technology. These previously undiagnosed dental infections, sometimes unknown even to the patient, could cause pain, discomfort, and even flu-like symptoms.
Science shows that this bacteria inflames your arteries, making them so fragile that it then becomes a cardiac “event”—a heart attack, stroke, or aneurysm, for example. Being diligent about your oral health, and investing in that interval of three-, four-, or six-month dental visits for cleanings and check-ups, will drastically affect your overall health, not just your teeth. It will also save you money as the cost of a heart attack, including both direct and indirect costs, can really add up. Considering this staggering dollar amount, families are often forced into bankruptcy. “If you look at the number one reason why people file personal bankruptcy,” says Dr. Wade. “The number one reason is hospital and…medical bills.” Even more, heart disease is reversible. That’s right, with a few lifestyle changes, you can reverse heart disease.
Dr. Wade encourages everyone to educate their loved ones often and early about the importance of taking care of your teeth and mouth to stave off these cardiac events.
Click here to watch this episode of the Beyond Face Value Show on YouTube with co-host Laura Lewis-Edwards.
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