Smoking as a permissive factor of periodontal disease in psoriasis

Population-based studies have identified smoking as a pathogenetic factor in chronic periodontitis. At the same time, chronic periodontal disease has also been found to occur more often in persons suffering from psoriasis than in controls with no psoriasis. It is known that smoking aggravates both periodontal disease and psoriasis, but so far it has not been investigated how smoking influences the occurrence and severity of periodontal disease in psoriasis.

A hospital-based study was conducted to investigate this question. The study population consisted of 82 psoriasis patients and 89 controls. All patients received a full-mouth periodontal examination, and a published classification based on bleeding on probing, clinical attachment level and probing depth was utilized for staging. Both patients and controls were divided into smoker and non-smoker groups, and the resulting groups were compared in terms of periodontal status. Beyond the descriptive statistics, odds ratios were computed.

Psoriasis in itself increased the likelihood of severe periodontal disease to 4.373 (OR, as compared to non-smoker controls, p<0.05), while smoking increased it to 24.278 (OR, as compared to non-smoker controls, p<0.001) in the studied population. In other words, the risk of severe periodontal disease in psoriasis turned out to be six times higher in smokers than in non-smokers.

The results of this study corroborate those of other studies regarding the link between psoriasis and periodontal disease, but they also seem to reveal a powerful detrimental effect of smoking on the periodontal health of psoriasis patients, whereby the authors propose that smoking may have a permissive effect on the development of severe periodontal disease in psoriasis.