The financial and human cost of gum disease

In the podcast, Iain Chapple – professor of periodontology at the University of Birmingham (UK) and former EFP secretary general – discusses the financial and human cost of gum disease, focusing on the report Time to take gum disease seriously commissioned by the EFP and published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) last year.

This ground-breaking report provided a comprehensive analysis of the financial and human cost of gum disease in six Western European countries.

He explains that one reason why gum disease may still not get the attention it deserves may be that in medical terms the mouth is considered as separate from the body as “doctors train on the rest of the body and the mouth is our domain and therefore they tend not to engage with it at all.”