Who among us wouldn’t like to stop bad breath once and for all? We have all been in those situations when we suddenly found ourselves with a monster case of halitosis and had to speak with someone at length. You suddenly begin to see them shifting back on their feet and slowly putting more distance between you and them. One wrong impression due to a case of bad breath and you can spend a lifetime trying to convince them that the problem was only momentary and not some reflection upon your oral hygiene habits. Perhaps the source of the bad breath is the stomach and is caused by stress and acid reflux but more often it is caused by bacteria and you don’t even know that you have a problem.
This is actually more common than you might think because the nerves in your nose that serve as odor receptors do shut down when exposed to continuous levels of halitosis. In fact, this can truly be a disadvantage especially when chronic halitosis is caused by gum disease.
The mildest form of gum disease is called gingivitis and the basic symptoms include:
- Gums sore to the touch
- Gums may bleed when brushing or eating some hard food such as an apple
- Inflammation of gingival tissue
- Reddening of the gums
- Chronic halitosis
Gum disease literally begins as a mild infection of your gingival tissue caused by bacteria that live along your teeth and gums. When plaque forms, these bacteria can breed faster because they are protected from your saliva which naturally helps prevent bad breath and gum disease by controlling the population of harmful microbes. Unless you remove the plaque every day with brushing and flossing, it will eventually harden until it becomes tartar.
Once you have tartar on your teeth, gum disease is already present and the bacteria will reproduce even faster behind this hardened layer.
This will make both the infection and bad breath problem worse and further inflame your gingival tissue. The disease will then progress to an advanced stage known as periodontitis where it the infection then spreads to your bone and gingival tissue that surround and support your teeth. At this point, the only way to treat the bad breath problem is to stop the infection causing the advanced gum disease.
If you fail to treat the gum disease, pockets will start to form in between the gums and the teeth.
These pockets will become very deep and will serve as a prime breeding ground for the bacteria because normal oral hygiene cannot remove them. The pockets will continue to grow as the toxins produced by the bacteria continue to dissolve and destroy both gum and bone tissue.
In time, teeth will loosen and fall out and your bad breath problem will no longer be tops on the priority list because a host of medical problems may ensue once the bacteria spread beyond the oral cavity. Some major health concerns posed by these dangerous microbes include:
- Infective Endocarditis
- Increased chances of developing coronary artery disease
- Increased chances of stroke
