Overview

Advanced gum disease (periodontitis) can be managed with a mixture of treatments and long-term care, by you and your regular dentist. Managing this condition is challenging and you will need to spend time looking after your teeth and gums for the rest of your life.

Read the NHS information about gum disease

Our undergraduate students might be able to give you some treatment to help you manage your gum health.

We can offer you 1 course of gum (periodontal) treatment, which usually involves scaling.

To get good gum health, it is often necessary to have more treatment to improve the stability of your gums. This extra treatment usually cannot be provided by the undergraduate students. We would advise that you register with a dentist during or after your treatment with us. This is so that you can have the extra gum treatment, and the long-term care for your gum health.

Periodontal treatment

First the students will fully assess your gum health. We might recommend some teeth are removed (extracted), as part of treatment. You can decide whether to have this done at this stage.

Unfortunately, if you decide not to have the extractions, we might not be able to offer further treatment with undergraduate students. This is because it might interfere with what we believe is the best treatment for you.

Treatment will include detailed advice on how to effectively clean your teeth and gums. If one of your risk factors is smoking, we will discuss the benefits of stopping.

Periodontal treatment includes advice on cleaning your teeth, and a course of plaque removal (scaling), above and below the gum line as needed. This will be done by undergraduate students under the supervision of qualified dentists, but the dentists might not be specialists in periodontology.

It is often necessary to numb the gums with injections of local anaesthetic if you require deep scaling. For people with advanced periodontal disease, it can take 5 to 6 visits to complete dental scaling. The time it takes will depend on the extent of your gum disease.

After treatment we will reassess your gum health, including measuring your gum pockets again to check how you have responded to the treatment.

During your treatment you might be treated by different students who are at different stages of their training.

Side effects

There are possible side effects of gum treatment, but not everyone gets them.

Tooth sensitivity

After deep scaling, your teeth might be more sensitive to cold and hot food or drink. This is usually temporary and we can give you advice to help manage this.

Gum recession

This side effect is sometimes called ‘gum shrinkage’. It can be different for everyone and is difficult to predict. It will depend on any bone loss you have before treatment, and how inflamed (swollen) your gums are.

This recession can make it easier for you to clean your teeth more effectively, but it can cause them to be more sensitive.

The treatment can mean that more of the tooth root is visible. Some people think this makes it look as though the gaps between their teeth are a little larger.

Gum recession is usually not reversible.

Further treatment

If there are other aspects of your treatment plan, in addition to gum treatment, we can often offer stabilisation (removal of decay and temporary filling) of caries (decay) and the management of any urgent problems. If your gum disease becomes more stable, we may be able to offer the replacement of missing teeth.

As you are more likely to get advanced periodontal disease in the future, you will need long-term care of your gums. This means that you must clean your teeth well, and have regular professional dental cleaning. Our students will not be able to provide this part of your care.

If the gum treatment is not as effective as we hope, especially if there is still a lot of plaque, we might not be able to offer more advanced dental treatment. This might include:

• fillings
• dentures
• crowns
• bridgework

If your gum disease can’t be managed by your usual dentist, the undergraduates will not be able to refer you for it. Only regular external dentists can refer you to a specialist for this. This is to make sure that you are registered with a dentist to get the long-term gum maintenance that is needed.

Support and more information

You can read our information about how dental healthcare professionals can refer patients for further treatments.