The Mouth as a Metabolic Mirror: Recognizing Early Risk and Elevating Patient Care
Featuring Expert Guest: Machelle Hudson Hoover, RDH, CHC, FAAOSH
What does metabolic health really mean? Most dental professionals immediately think of diabetes, yet metabolic health reaches far beyond that single diagnosis. It influences inflammation, healing, saliva, pH, airway stability, energy regulation, and how patients respond to traditional oral homecare. What if I told you that dental professionals are uniquely positioned to recognize the earliest signs of metabolic imbalance long before it is identified in a medical setting?
With almost half of American adults obese and nearly seventy five percent overweight or obese, metabolic stress has become a common part of daily clinical practice. Early metabolic shifts often present intraorally through inflammatory fluctuations, salivary imbalance, dry mouth, and rising susceptibility to periodontal and caries disease. Lifestyle behaviors including nutrition patterns, physical inactivity, inadequate sleep, airway resistance, stress load, medication use, and hormonal transitions can intensify these early changes.
This course provides a foundational understanding of where to begin. It is designed to expand awareness, open clinical thinking, and help dental teams recognize the opportunities they already have to elevate patient care. Participants will learn how to strengthen risk-factor assessment through comprehensive health history review and how to connect lifestyle behaviors and systemic patterns to oral findings. The goal is not to have every answer, but to develop curiosity, confidence, and a starting point for meaningful conversations that support long-term oral and systemic wellness.
Perio Tray™ therapy from Perio Protect delivers medication deep below the gums so that the medication can fight infections causing the host inflammatory response. The seal on the tray is the key to deep delivery.
The primary antimicrobial used in Perio Tray™ delivery is Perio Gel™ with 1.7% hydrogen peroxide. This effective, broad-spectrum antimicrobial decreases our reliance on antibiotics and has the added benefits of freshening breath and whitening teeth. Patients love these benefits.
Perio Tray™ therapy is offered most often to patients with gingivitis or periodontitis, but it is also prescribed for patients with infected margins around restorations, with peri-implant mucositis or peri-implantitis.
Because Perio Tray™ therapy helps improve gingival health and prevent the recurrence of disease, it also extends the life of restorations, giving you optimal restorative results.
Perio Protect has the only tray delivery system with research to support these claims.
"As a periodontist, I have tried just about every method of treating periodontal disease that makes scientific sense. The key to success is long-term maintenance. Perio Protect is the one treatment that I have utilized in the last five years that works. Perio Protect is easy for patients to use, which means high compliance and high compliance means lots of success. It has become part of my winning formula."
Dr. Gordon Fraser
Conyers, GA
Reducing Oral Inflammation Improves General Health and Wellness
Periodontal disease is not just an inflammatory response to a bacterial infection that leads to tooth loss. It is a chronic inflammatory disease with multiple risk and modifying factors that prime individual patients to respond differently to polymicrobial biofilm-induced inflammation.
Perio Tray™ delivery of Perio Gel™ (1.7% hydrogen peroxide) helps better manage inflammation by suppressing pro-inflammatory gram-negative populations in the subgingival microbiome and encouraging the repopulation of healthier bacterial species. When delivered and held deep below the gums, peroxide works as a broad-spectrum antimicrobial, physically disrupting the biofilm matrix that protects biofilm communities and lysing bacterial cell walls.
Peroxide via Perio Tray™ delivery does more than just kill bacteria. Its release of oxygen – as it activates, peroxide turns into O2 + H2O – changes the microenvironment of the periodontal pocket so that healthy bacterial species repopulate at the expense of pathogenic ones. The environmental changes in the pockets thus have a direct effect on the changes in the composition of bacterial species in the microbiome.
Because periodontal diseases place a chronic low-grade burden on the immune system and exacerbate other inflammatory primed comorbidities like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, rheumatoid arthritis and others, it's important to treat at every stage.
