Stress occurs within everyone’s life, from the onset of life until a person takes their last breath. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health describe stress as a physical and emotional reaction to an experience that will occur within one’s life as changes occur. Stress is an action that occurs when the body encounters an experience triggered by a stressor, either internally or externally, that brings the body beyond its normal homeostatic threshold. In return the body shuts down to protect itself from overloading and overwhelming itself, from the stressor that is causing this reaction. Stress is a normal feeling, but chronic and long-term stress can lead to many disruptions to an individual’s health and disrupt their normal lifestyle.
In 2019 it has been estimated that 70% of primary care visits are related to problems related to stress and lifestyle. Stress can present itself in numerous forms depending on the individual. Stress alters numerous aspects of life, it can be emotionally, physically, psychologically, etc. There are a wide range of health problems that stem from chronic stress; stress can disrupt eating habits, normal body functions, cause mood swings and unwanted behavioral changes, trigger latent diseases and many other problems. One of the biggest, yet unnoticed changes that stress can cause is how chronic stress leads to a decline in oral health, as an effect of the constant changes going on within the body. The oral cavity is one of the biggest indicators that there are changes going on within a patient.
This literature review will evaluate the various oral conditions that stress can cause within the oral cavity and the resulting impact to one’s overall health. Oral health is direly important to overall health. A routine exam of the oral cavity can associate many systemic diseases affecting an individual based on the oral manifestations that are presented. While other symptoms often go unnoticed and get neglected until it is too late, the oral cavity is an early indicator that there is something that is causing a disruption to the body.
The oral manifestations that were focused on for this literature review included some very common cases while others were more circumstantial. The goal was to link the oral manifestations to common oral conditions that stress brought upon the body, including periodontal disease, bruxism, habitual biting of the oral mucosa and geographic tongue.
Bruxism, and periodontal disease yielded the most significant findings and its relation to stress while geographic tongue did lack some critical findings because of the condition being transient in nature and underreported. A reduction in stress can lead to a lower incidence of these oral conditions and systemic diseases in the population. Numerous research studies were evaluated to access the relation to stress and its effects on oral health, although if this review were to be done again, more data collected over a 5-year span on each condition and manifestation would be supportive.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43814 |
| Date | 05 February 2022 |
| Creators | Brannon, Kenisha A. |
| Contributors | Davies, Theresa A. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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