How Cigarette Smoking Affects Your Teeth
Posted on: 10 February 2015
The dangers and risks that go with smoking are already considered common knowledge nowadays. It's already an established fact that smoking will expose you to many severe health problems such as lung cancer. However, what many people still doesn't seem to realize is that smoking does not only harm your lungs, but also your teeth. Truth is, smokers are twice as prone to losing their teeth than non-smokers.
Apart from this, smoking also tends to put your gums at greater risks. It decreases your power to combat possible infections in your mouth, and it ultimately increases your susceptibility to periodontal disease. Smokers are actually more likely to develop cavities and be in serious need of root canal treatments than non-smokers. Overall, smoking presents big-time damages to your oral health.
The Scariest Risk of All
Smoking is one of the leading controllable risk factors for oral cancer. In fact, a study in the UK regarding oral cancer discovered that smoking caused an overwhelming 70% of male oral cancer cases and 55% for women. This proves that smoking plays a huge role in the development of oral cancer.
What You Can Do To Avoid the Risks of Oral Cancer
1. The most important thing is to minimize the factors that contribute to these risks.
- Stop smoking.
- Smoking and drinking, when combined, presents even more danger.
- Some HPV strains relate to oral cancer so be sure to practice safe habits.
2. Be wary of the signs
As shown in the study, people without any of the risk factors above can still contract oral cancer. This means that even when you don't smoke, you still need to be wary of these common oral cancer symptoms:
- A red or white sore in your mouth that has been there for at least two weeks.
- Sudden pain or numbness in your mouth that you can't seem to explain.
- Trouble swallowing
3. Always be preventive by having regular oral cancer checkups. With a proper examination and evaluation of your mouth tissues, it will be easy to pinpoint signs of oral cancer at an early stage, making it more possible to treat and cure.
Ultimately, the best way to ensure that you're on the safer side is to quit smoking. This way you're reducing your risks of getting oral cancer by at least 50%. Quitting does not just lessen your oral cancer risks but also risks to other known health problems caused by smoking.
If you really can't stop smoking just yet, at least see to it that you take good care of your health by having regular checkups. This will help you detect early signs of any disease. Talk to your dentist, such as someone from Malwin & Malwin Family Dentistry, for more information.
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