Association between hypertension and chronic periodontitis in a Portuguese population

Abstract

Introduction: Periodontal disease (PD) is an inflammatory disease of the periodontal tissues. Periodontal disease is highly prevalent in adolescents, adults, and elderly, and is a major public health concern [1,2]. Previous studies show a slight superior prevalence of mild forms in young adults [3], and a significant difference in periodontal disease type distribution by gender, with severe generalized chronic periodontitis condition being more prevalent in men [4,5]. Moderate periodontitis is even more common, affecting 40–60% of adults [6,7]. Over the last years, PD have been associated with arterial hypertension [6–8]. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the possible association between the prevalence of self-reported hypertension and the periodontal status in an adult Portuguese population.

Materials and methods: This study was approved by the Egas Moniz Ethical Committee (Ethical Application Ref: 595). This retrospective observational study included patients from the Periodontology Department, that were diagnosed between April 2017 and April 2018. Before clinical examinations, all patients answered a general and oral health questionnaire that included information such as age, gender, smoking status, self-reported general medical history and medication. Periodontitis was defined according to Page & Eke [9]. From a total of 267 patients, 7 were excluded due to incomplete data. Thus, it was gathered a final sample size of 260 patients. Descriptive and inferential statistics methodologies were applied, using IBM SPSS Statistics version 24.0 for Macintosh.

Results: From the 260 patients (mean age 56.6 ± 12.4), the majority had severe chronic periodontitis (n =140, 53.8%). Patients with none or mild chronic periodontitis didn’t refer hypertension. The prevalence of self-reported hypertension was 38.61% and 36.43%, in patients with moderate and severe chronic periodontitis respectively. Overall, there was a statistical difference between the prevalence of self-reported hypertension between the severity of chronic periodontitis type (p = 0.004) (Table 1).

Discussion and conclusions: The results show a statistical difference in the prevalence of self-reported hypertension according to the chronic periodontitis severity. To minimize potential bias, we tried to overcome the limitation of being a self-reported hypertension information by confirming current medication of the patient. The findings in this sample are according to the previous studies referred overhead.