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 [Citation1,Citation2]. Previous studies show a slight superior prevalence of mild forms in young adults [Citation3], and a significant difference in periodontal disease type distribution by gender, with severe generalized chronic periodontitis condition being more prevalent in men [Citation4,Citation5]. Moderate periodontitis is even more common, affecting 40–60% of adults [Citation6,Citation7]. Over the last years, PD have been associated with arterial hypertension [Citation6–8]. 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 [Citation9]. 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) ().
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.
Table 1. Prevalence of periodontitis types and self-reported hypertension.
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