Periodontal disease: A systemic condition

For decades, periodontitis has been considered to be a local inflammatory disease of the periodontal tissues in the oral cavity. Initially, associations of periodontitis with a multitude of noncommunicable diseases were each studied separately, and relationships were shown. The associations of periodontitis with morbidities, such as cardiovascular diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes mellitus, respiratory diseases, have been demonstrated. As most such studies were cross-sectional in nature, questions about causality cannot be univocally answered. And periodontitis as an independent risk factor for one systemic disease, becomes even more difficult to assess since recently periodontitis has also been…