Smokers have a good reputation for having bad teeth. They get “nicotine stains,” people say, turning their teeth from a brilliant white in to a dull yellow-brown.
Faced with comments similar to this, most vapers would rightly point out that nicotine in pure form is in fact colourless. It appears obvious that – much like with all the health hazards – the issue for the teeth from smoking isn’t the nicotine, it’s the tar.
However they are we actually right? Recent surveys on the topic have flagged up vapor cigarette being a potential concern, and although they’re a long way from showing dental problems in actual-world vapers, it is actually a sign that there might be issues later on.
To know the opportunity perils of vaping to the teeth, it seems sensible to find out a lttle bit about how smoking causes dental health issues. While there are lots of differences involving the two – inhaling tar-laden smoke is very different from inhaling droplets of liquid – vapers and smokers are in contact with nicotine and also other chemicals inside a similar way.
For smokers, dental issues are more likely than they will be in never-smokers or ex-smokers. By way of example, current smokers are 4x as prone to have poor oral health in comparison to people who’ve never smoked, and they’re over twice as very likely to have three or more oral health issues.
Smoking affects your oral health in a number of ways, including the yellow-brown staining and stinky breath it causes right through to much more serious oral health issues like gum disease (technically called periodontal disease) and oral cancer. Smokers likewise have more tartar than non-smokers, which is actually a method of hardened plaque, otherwise known as calculus.
There are more results of smoking that induce trouble for your teeth, too. As an example, smoking impacts your defense mechanisms and inhibits your mouth’s power to heal itself, each of which can exacerbate other difficulties brought on by smoking.
Gum disease is among the most popular dental issues in the UK and round the world, and smokers are around two times as likely to get it as non-smokers. It’s infection in the gums and also the bone surrounding your teeth, which over time results in the tissue and bone breaking down and may cause tooth loss.
It’s a result of plaque, the term for a combination of saliva as well as the bacteria in your mouth. Along with inducing the gum irritation and inflammation that characterises gum disease, plaque also directly impacts your teeth, resulting in teeth cavities.
Once you consume food containing a great deal of sugar or starch, the bacteria process the carbohydrates it includes for energy. This process creates acid like a by-product. In the event you don’t keep your teeth clean, this acid eventually impacts your tooth’s surface and causes decay. But plaque contains lots of different bacteria, and a number of these directly irritate your gums too.
So while among the consequences of plaque build-up is more relevant for gum disease, both cause issues with your teeth and smokers are more likely to suffer both consequences than non-smokers. The effects smoking has in your immune system suggest that in case a smoker gets a gum infection as a result of plaque build-up, his or her body is more unlikely so that you can fight them back. Furthermore, when damage is performed due to the build-up of plaque, the impact of smoking on wound healing will make it harder for your personal gums to heal themselves.
After a while, in the event you don’t treat gum disease, spaces will start to start up involving the gums and your teeth. This concern gets worse as more of the tissues break down, and ultimately can cause your teeth becoming loose or perhaps falling out.
Overall, smokers have twice the chance of periodontal disease in comparison to non-smokers, and also the risk is larger for people who smoke more and who smoke for much longer. On top of this, the thing is less likely to react well in the event it gets treated.
For vapers, understanding the connection between smoking and gum disease invites one question: will it be the nicotine or maybe the tar in tobacco that causes the issues? Needless to say, as vapers we’d be inclined to blame the smoke and tar rather than nicotine, but could be straight to?
low levels of oxygen in the tissues – and also this could predispose your gums to infections, in addition to lowering the ability of your respective gums to heal themselves.
Unfortunately, it’s not necessarily clear which explanation or mix of them is bringing about the problems for smokers. For vaping, though, you will find clearly some potential benefits. There are far fewer toxins in vapour, so any issues caused because of them will be less severe in vapers than smokers.
The last two potential explanations relate right to nicotine, but you can find a few things worth noting.
For the notion that nicotine reduces circulation of blood and that causes the problems, there are some problems. Studies looking directly for that impact of this on the gums (here and here) have found either no alteration of circulation of blood or slight increases.
Although nicotine does create your bloodstream constrict, the impact smoking has on blood pressure level will overcome this and blood circulation for the gums increases overall. This is actually the opposite of what you’d expect if the explanation were true, and at least shows that it isn’t the main factor at play. Vaping has a smaller amount of an effect on blood pressure, though, hence the result for vapers may be different.
One other idea is that the gum tissues are becoming less oxygen, which is causing the situation. Although research has shown that the hypoxia brought on by smoking parallels how nicotine acts in the body, nicotine isn’t the only thing in smoke that may have this effect. Deadly carbon monoxide in particular can be a part of smoke (however, not vapour) which includes just that effect, and hydrogen cyanide is another.
It’s not completely clear which would be to blame, but as wound healing (which is actually a closely-related issue) is affected in smokers but not in NRT users, it’s unlikely that nicotine alone is performing each of the damage or perhaps nearly all of it.
Unsurprisingly, most of the discussion with this topic conflates nicotine with smoke, and this will make it hard to work through the amount of a part nicotine really has. There isn’t much evidence considering this in relation to e-cig reviews specifically, as you’d expect, but there isn’t much associated with nicotine away from smoke by any means.
First, there were some studies looking specifically at how vaping affects the teeth. However, these reports have mainly taken the sort of cell culture studies. These are called “in vitro” (literally “in glass”) studies, even though they’re a good choice for learning the biological mechanisms underpinning the potential health results of vaping (as well as other exposures, medicines and pretty much anything), it really is a limited type of evidence. Even though something affects a number of cells within a culture doesn’t mean it can have the identical effect inside a real human body.
With that in mind, the studies on vaping as well as your teeth is summarized by way of a review from March 2017. The authors address evidence about gum disease, including cell culture studies showing that e-liquids have harmful effects on ligament cells and connective tissues within the gums. Aldehydes in e-cig vapour may have impacts on proteins and cause damage to DNA. Many of these effects could theoretically lead to periodontal disease in vapers.
Nicotine also has the possibility to result in trouble for the teeth too, although again this is founded on cell studies and evidence from people smoking tobacco. The authors debate that vaping may lead to impaired healing.
But the truth is that currently, we don’t have greatly evidence specifically concerning vaping, and a lot of the aforementioned is ultimately speculation. It’s speculation depending on mechanistic studies of methods nicotine interacts with cells inside your mouth, thus it can’t be completely ignored, nevertheless the evidence we certainly have up to now can’t really say an excessive amount of regarding what can happen to real-world vapers in reality.
However, there exists one study that looked at oral health in actual-world vapers, along with its results were generally positive. The study included 110 smokers who’d switched to vaping along with their oral health examined at the outset of the analysis, after 60 days and after 120 days. The vapers were split up into those who’d smoked cheaper than 10 years (group 1) and those who’d smoked for extended (group 2).
At the beginning of the research, 85 % of group 1 had a plaque index score of 1, with just 15 of those without plaque at all. For group 2, none of the participants enjoyed a plaque score of , with about three-quarters scoring 2 out from 3, and all of those other participants split between scores of 1 and three. By the end of the study, 92% of group 1 and 87 % in the longer-term smokers in group 2 had plaque lots of .
For gum bleeding, at the beginning of the investigation, 61% of group 1 participants and 65% of group 2 participants bled after being poked having a probe. By the final follow-up, 92% of group 1 and 98% of group 2 had no bleeding. The researchers also took a papillary bleeding index, which involves a probe being inserted involving the gum-line and the teeth, and similar improvements were seen. At the start of the analysis, 66% of group 1 and 60% of group 2 participants showed no bleeding, but at the conclusion of the analysis, this had increased to 98% of group 1 and 100% of group 2.
It may possibly only be one study, nevertheless the message it sends is quite clear: switching to vaping from smoking is apparently an optimistic move so far as your teeth have concerns.
The investigation considering real-world vapers’ teeth had pretty good success, but since the cell research shows, there exists still some likelihood of issues over the long-term. Unfortunately, adding to that study there is very little we can easily do but speculate. However, we do get some extra evidence we can easily call on.
If nicotine is accountable for the dental issues that smokers experience – or at best partially liable for them – then we should see signs and symptoms of problems in individuals that use nicotine without smoking. Snus – the Swedish form of smokeless tobacco that’s essentially snuff in the mini teabag – and nicotine gums give two great resources for evidence we are able to use to analyze the issue in much more detail.
In the whole, the evidence doesn’t often point the finger at nicotine greatly. One study investigated evidence covering 2 decades from Sweden, with 1,600 participants overall, and located that although severe gum disease was more prevalent in smokers, snus users didn’t appear to be at increased risk in any way. There exists some indication that gum recession and loss of tooth attachment is much more common on the location the snus is held, but about the whole the chance of issues is far more closely relevant to smoking than snus use.
Even if this hasn’t been studied around you might think, a study in nicotine gum users provides yet more evidence that nicotine isn’t truly the issue. Chewing sugar-containing gum obviously has the possibility to affect your teeth even without nicotine, but a comparison between 78 individuals who chewed nicotine gum for 15 weeks with 79 who chewed non-nicotine gum found no difference in any way on stuff like plaque, gingivitis, tartar along with other oral health related outcomes. Again, smoking did increase the risk of tartar and gingivitis.
Overall, while there are several plausible explanations for how nicotine could affect your dental health, evidence really doesn’t support the link. This is certainly great news for just about any vapers, snus users or long-term NRT users, nevertheless it should go without praoclaiming that avoiding smoking and looking after your teeth generally remains important for your oral health.
With regards to nicotine, evidence we have now to date shows that there’s little to think about, and the cell studies directly addressing vaping are difficult to draw firm conclusions from without further evidence. However, these aren’t the only ways in which vaping could impact your teeth and dental health.
Something most vapers know is that vaping can dehydrate you. Both PG and VG are hygroscopic, which means they suck moisture out of their immediate environment. That is why getting a dry mouth after vaping is really common. Your mouth is within near-constant exposure to PG and VG and the majority of vapers quickly get comfortable with drinking more than ever before to compensate. The question is: does this constant dehydration pose a risk to your teeth?
It comes with an interesting paper on the potential link between mild dehydration and dental issues, and overall it stresses that there is no direct evidence of a hyperlink. However, there are many indirect pieces of evidence and suggestive findings that hint at potential problems.
This largely comes down to your saliva. By literally “washing” your teeth mainly because it moves round the mouth, containing ions that neutralise acids through your diet, containing calcium and phosphate that could turn back negative effects of acids in your teeth and containing proteins that impact how molecules connect to your teeth, saliva appears to be an essential factor in maintaining dental health. If dehydration – from vaping or another type – leads to reduced saliva production, this could have a knock-on effect on your teeth making cavities as well as other issues very likely.
The paper points out there plenty of variables to think about and that makes drawing firm conclusions difficult, however the authors write:
“The link between dehydration and dental disease will not be directly proved, although there is considerable circumstantial evidence to indicate that this type of link exists.”
And here is the closest we can easily really arrive at a solution to the question. However, there are several interesting anecdotes within the comments for this post on vaping as well as your teeth (though the article itself just speculates about the risk for gum disease).
One commenter, “Skwurl,” following a year of exclusive vaping, highlights that dry mouth and cotton mouth are typical, and this can lead to foul breath and generally seems to cause problems with dental cavities. The commenter states to practice good dental hygiene, however there’s absolutely no way of knowing this, nor what their teeth were like before switching to vaping.
However, this isn’t the only story from the comments, and even though it’s all speculative, with all the evidence discussed above, it’s certainly plausible that vaping can result in dehydration-related problems with your teeth.
The potential of risk is much from certain, but it’s clear there are some simple actions you can take to lessen your risk of dental health problems from vaping.
Avoid dehydration. This is significant for virtually any vaper anyway, but considering the potential risks linked to dehydration, it’s especially vital for the teeth. I have a bottle water with me always, but however, you get it done, be sure to fight dry mouth with plenty of fluids.
Vape less often with higher-nicotine juice. One idea that originally has come from Dr. Farsalinos (more broadly about reducing the risk from vaping) is the fact vaping more infrequently with higher-nicotine juice is safer than vaping more with lower-nicotine juice. To your teeth, this same advice is very valid – the dehydration is related to PG and VG, so the less of it you inhale, the smaller the result will probably be. Technically, when the theories about nicotine’s role in gum disease are true, improving your intake wouldn’t be ideal, but overall it appears to be nicotine isn’t the important factor.
Pay extra focus on your teeth whilst keeping brushing. Although some vapers may have problems, it’s obvious that many of us haven’t experienced issues. The explanation for this particular is likely that many vapers take care of their teeth generally speaking. Brush twice each day to minimise any risk and keep an eye out for potential issues. When you notice an issue, see your dentist and acquire it dealt with.
The good thing is this really is all relatively easy, and aside from the second suggestion you’ll most likely be doing all you need to anyway. However, should you begin to notice issues or maybe you feel ecigrreviews your teeth are becoming worse, taking steps to lower dehydration and paying extra awareness of your teeth is a great idea, together with seeing your dentist.
While e-cigs is likely to be significantly better for your teeth than smoking, there are still potential issues due to dehydration and also possibly to do with nicotine. However, it’s important to obtain a bit of perspective prior to taking any drastic action, especially with so little evidence to support any concerns.
If you’re switching into a low-risk type of nicotine use, it’s unlikely to become due to your teeth. You have lungs to concern yourself with, along with your heart as well as a lot else. The research so far mainly focuses on these much more serious risks. So even when vaping does turn out having some effect on your teeth or gums, it won’t change the truth that vaping is really a better idea than smoking. There are more priorities.