Next EFP Perio Talks will focus on EFP’s Perio & Caries campaign

The next EFP Perio Talks session on Instagram will bring together two leading periodontists. They will discuss the links between periodontal disease and caries. As well as highlighting the federation’s continuing Perio & Caries campaign.

Mariano Sanz (professor of periodontology at the Complutense University of Madrid, co-chair of the EFP’s workshop committee) will discuss the connections between these two oral diseases with Richard Lee Kin (Dublin Dental Hospital, Irish Society of Periodontology) on Thursday 22 October at 19.00 (CET).

Perio & Caries

During the Perio Talks session, the team will unveil a new animation for the Perio & Caries campaign.

This animation, available in 10 languages, is aimed at members of the oral healthcare team. It focuses on the role of dental biofilm in causing both dental caries and periodontal disease. And it will highlight strategies on how to simultaneously prevent them.

The Perio & Caries campaign, supported through an educational grant from Colgate, features a wide range of educational material including:

• Five brochures, with specific recommendations for the oral-healthcare team, non-dental healthcare professionals, researchers, policymakers, and the public
• The scientific report Relationship between caries and gum disease
• Video interviews with the experts involved in the project
• Infographics to visually outline key strategies for preventing simultaneous caries and periodontal diseases
• All the materials report on the outcomes of Perio Workshop 2016, jointly organised by the EFP and ORCA (European Organisation for Caries Research) and also sponsored by Colgate. This focuses on ‘the boundaries between dental caries and periodontal disease’. It reviews all available evidence on interactions, common risk factors, and shared patterns between tooth decay and gum disease.

Linking caries and periodontal disease

The Perio Workshop was the first major scientific attempt in the world to consider dental caries and periodontal disease not as separate entities, but as interrelated processes that can share genetic, aetiological, social, and environmental determinants. Although they follow different trajectories and usually emerge at different ages.

Commenting on the workshop and the campaign, Professor Sanz says: ‘These disease processes have been historically analysed under very different optics. The cultures of analysing the scientific evidence by the cariologists and the periodontists were clearly well apart.

‘This workshop allowed us to identify the areas of convergence between these diseases and also the aspects in prevention and therapy that are key to both disease processes.’