Dental Health: Smoking & Gums

Video Transcript

"So are you wondering how smoking affects your gums. Well my name is Michelle and I'm a dental assistant with Solutions and I'm going to explain to you on how smoking does affect your gums. Pretty much if you kind of take a look here at this chart, you can see that when ever you are smoking it actually reduces your resistance to peritonitis or gingivitis. It actually promotes your gums to recede which then in return will also start to cause an inflammation in your gums which meaning the gums will become very puffy and irritated. They'll actually start to get like a deep reddish almost like a plush bloody look to them. And then they can even become what we call it's very like tender to touch and then at that time or whenever the doctors and they are probing around your gum tissue, it actually you'll start to have a lot of bleeding. So this is something that smoking, it does start to affect your gums over a period of time especially if you are a consistent smoker. But and also too one of the main affects from smoking is oral cancer. If you're a smoker for many years or even for, even a few years you always run that tendency or risk of getting oral cancer so you would definitely if you are a smoker you would need to see your general dentist on a regular basis so therefore he can kind of monitor you do his regular routine exams and his oral cancer screening just to determine and to make sure that you don't have any cancerous tissue present in your mouth. So once again my name is Michelle and I'm a dental assistant with Solutions and I just gave you the different, the causes of smoking and how it affects your gums."