This is Dr. Peter Cabrera. Today we are going to speak about something that doesn’t receive the amount of attention that it deserves, and that is the effect of blood pressure medications on gum health.
First of all, some background. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. One person dies from heart disease every 34 seconds. Almost 700,000 people died from heart disease in 2020. One out of every five deaths is due to cardiovascular disease, and according to the CDC, the cost of managing heart disease is almost $230 billion a year. There are a number of factors that significantly contribute to heart disease, the one that we’re going to be discussing today is hypertension. High blood pressure, according to the Mayo Clinic, can be controlled with lifestyle but also with medications. One classic medication is called calcium channel blockers, and of those, there are two of particular interest, which are Amlodipine and Nifedipine, also known as Norvasc and Procardia. These are known to cause gum overgrowth. Typically what happens the gum begins to overgrow; this is a side effect. In between the teeth and we believe that on plaque, bacterial plaque is the main source of the irritant that causes the overgrowth. With time these lesions that begin in between the teeth can coalesce and form almost a wall cover part or all of the teeth. In this particular situation, we’re looking at a 53-year-old female who has been on Amlodipine for two years and whose chief complaint is that her gums are bleeding over several months. The overgrowth causes a bacterial trap; with more bacteria, we get more inflammation and overgrowth, so it is essentially a vicious cycle. The treatment or the management has to do with medical number one, finding an alternate drug in both in terms of the periodontal health the gum health, which involves just basically detail cleaning so you can see in this case of this patient, the pretreatment it was basically some deep cleaning and a little bit of time and medication, were able to significantly reduce the overgrowth and in addition limit, the amount of surgical intervention required so although in this particular situation there may be some residual overgrowth surgical correction will be minor if at all if it’s needed at all and again this is the same patient with the same overgrowth.
So, in summary, certain blood pressure medications can have an effect on the gums by creating overgrowth as a side effect.
Although some individuals think surgery is always the answer, the need for surgical intervention can be significantly decreased with appropriate management.
