Association of Tooth Scaling with Acute Myocardial Infarction and Analysis of the Corresponding Medical Expenditure: A Nationwide Population-Based Study

Abstract

Accumulating evidence has shown a significant correlation between periodontal diseases and systemic diseases. In this study, we investigated the association between the frequency of tooth scaling and acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Here, a group of 7164 participants who underwent tooth scaling was compared with another group of 7164 participants without tooth scaling through propensity score matching to assess AMI risk by Cox’s proportional hazard regression. The results show that the hazard ratio of AMI from the tooth scaling group was 0.543 (0.441, 0.670) and the average expenses of AMI in the follow up period was USD 265.76, while the average expenses of AMI in follow up period for control group was USD 292.47. The tooth scaling group was further divided into two subgroups, namely A and B, to check the influence of tooth scaling frequency on AMI risk. We observed that (1) the incidence rate of AMI in the group without any tooth scaling was 3.5%, which is significantly higher than the incidence of 1.9% in the group with tooth scaling; (2) the tooth scaling group had lower total medical expenditures than those of the other group because of the high medical expenditure associated with AMI; and (3) participants who underwent tooth scaling had a lower AMI risk than those who never underwent tooth scaling had. Therefore, the results of this study demonstrate the importance of preventive medicine.

Periodontitis and systemic inflammation as independent and interacting risk factors for mortality: evidence from a prospective cohort study

“…In addition, a population-based observational study of 247,696 Koreans reported a 14% lower risk of CVD events in individuals with regular dental visits for professional cleaning [ 75 ]. Moreover, in a nationwide study in Taiwan, the incidence rate of acute myocardial infarction was 3.5% in 7164 participants who did not receive dental scaling, almost twice as high as in the matched control group (1.9%) who received regular scaling [ 76 ]. Finally, several systematic reviews agreed that despite evidence of beneficial effects of periodontal treatment on surrogate measures of CVD, there is a lack of adequate randomised controlled trials focusing on hard CVD endpoints to reasonably support or refute preventive effects [ 47 , 70 , 77 ].…”