Key takeaways
- Smoking harms oral health, causing cancer risks.
- Bad breath, gingivitis, and tooth loss consequences.
- Hazardous smoke triggers irreversible oral health events.
- Smokers face heightened risks of frequent infections.
- Slow recovery and higher pain levels in surgery.
When you’re going through your daily oral hygiene routine, like brushing your teeth, do you ever stop and think about your mouth’s health in general?
Let’s be honest; most of us hardly give it a second thought.
It’s kind of funny when you think about it, considering how much we use our mouths every day—from chatting away to munching on our favourite snacks and showing off all sorts of emotions.
For many smokers, taking care of their lips and overall oral health often gets pushed aside, and the serious effects smoking has on your mouth are usually ignored.
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After taking a puff, that harmful smoke makes contact with the roof of your mouth, your tongue, and your teeth.
If you’ve been smoking for a while, you might have even dealt with gingivitis or noticed that your recovery from a recent tooth surgery took longer than expected.
Unfortunately, smoking can significantly raise your risk of health issues, like developing mouth cancer, and that risk only goes up as you get older and keep smoking.
So, let’s take a closer look at how smoking can seriously mess with your oral health.
Increases the Risk of Mouth Cancer
Smoking can be deadly in more ways than one, and one of the biggest risks is mouth cancer.
Even after surviving mouth cancer, if someone goes back to smoking, there’s a good chance the cancer will return within a few years.
It shows how powerful nicotine addiction can be, even after such a life-threatening experience.
Cigarettes are packed with dangerous chemicals, including carcinogens, harmful free radicals, and cadmium—all of which are major culprits in causing mouth cancer.
It’s scary to think that every puff brings those risks closer.
Gingivitis
A smoker’s breath can already be pretty terrible, but gingivitis takes it to the next level.
Increased plaque levels in a smoker’s mouth can cause gum disease or gingivitis. Due to the slow immune system response in smokers, gum infection occurs, with immensely bad breath as a major side effect.
Gingivitis also causes your gums to swell and feel tender, which are signs of weakening and thinning. Smokers with gingivitis may also notice their gums often bleed while lightly brushing and flossing.
By stopping smoking, you can restore your gums within a year or less.
Premature Tooth Loss
Gingivitis is already bad enough at its mildest – imagine if you get a severe case of it. Periodontitis is the advanced stage of gingivitis, and it’s the one causing premature tooth loss in many smokers.
Periodontitis can pull gums away and reduce your jawbone’s density, which can loosen teeth to the point they simply fall out.
Untreated gingivitis, or its ineffective treatment due to smoking, will continue to weaken the gums and cause infections, leading to periodontitis. If you feel your teeth are looser than usual and chewing has become too painful, you may have developed this condition.
However, even if smokers don’t have gingivitis or periodontitis, they’re still at a high risk of losing their teeth prematurely.
After quitting smoking, your improved immune system response after successfully quitting smoking can decrease incidents of gingivitis, tooth loss, and even tooth decay.
Frequent Throat Infections
Daily smokers shouldn’t be surprised they’re always down with the flu, have sore throats, or have a smoker’s cough.
Most smokers experience throat infections that happen almost every other day. Their weakened and slowed immune system, caused by chemicals in cigarette smoke, make it easy for bacteria to thrive.
Studies have discovered that the population and variety of bacteria present in a smoker’s throat are much higher compared to a non-smoker. This means smokers are at a higher risk of contracting different kinds of throat infections, ranging from mild to severe.
Once you quit smoking, you’ll feel great relief from throat problems.
Delayed Tooth Extraction/Oral Surgery Recovery
If you’re wondering why your recent oral extraction or dental implant recovery is slow, it’s due to cigarette smoking. Aside from slow recovery, you probably noticed that you felt much more pain during the operation than what non-smoking peers had mentioned.
Smokers experience much higher pain levels and slower recovery during surgery than those who didn’t consume cigarettes.
Cigarette smoking has also been linked to slowing the blood-clotting process, the body’s capability to heal its wounds, including surgery. A study shows that platelets, which play a key role in healing, are much lower in smokers than non-smokers.
You can make your next dental implant or operation feel much better and recover faster if you quit smoking today.
Summary
Smoking and oral health are directly linked, as certain as a smoker’s mouth touching the cigarette’s filter. Any smoker who wants to reduce their cancer risk or keep all their teeth until they grow old should consider quitting the habit.
Kicking out smoking from your life has many benefits, such as having better mental health and feeling physically better. In fact, there are so many good things that can happen to any ex-smoker after six days of quitting smoking.
If you’re reading this article because you want to enjoy these benefits but need help quitting, you’re in the right place.
Smokefree Clinic gives you access to many medically reviewed and trustworthy resources that can inform and aid you in your path to wellness, so have a look around!
If you’re ready to get started, Smokefree can connect you to Australian healthcare professionals who excel in helping patients quit smoking for good.
Link Reference
- https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/oral-and-oropharyngeal-cancer/risk-factors-and-prevention
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53010/
- https://europepmc.org/article/med/281495
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002817714603688
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/COPD.S140243
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7588501/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6201005/