COVID-19 & Gum Disease
Your gums might affect how sick you get with COVID
Why This Paper
COVID-19 changed everything for us — school, family, even how we think about health. Classes went online overnight. Families lost jobs. Hospitals ran out of beds. Masks and sanitizer became survival tools. We learned how much public health really matters—and how fast it can fall apart.
So when I saw this 2021 study titled “Association between periodontitis and severity of COVID-19 infection.” I wanted to know:
Could your mouth make COVID worse?
Turns out, this was honestly scary.
“Are people with gum disease more likely to have serious COVID-19 complications like death, ICU admission, or needing a ventilator?”
They weren’t testing a treatment or doing an experiment — this was a case-control study, meaning they looked back at patients who had already gone through COVID and compared those who had serious complications to those who didn’t.
Then looked at their gum health.
How the Study Worked
Location: Qatar
Time frame: Feb–July 2020 (early in the pandemic)
Patients: 568 people who had COVID-19
“Cases” were patients who died, were in the ICU, or needed a ventilator
“Controls” were COVID patients who recovered without serious complications
They checked dental X-rays from the same national database to see if each person had signs of periodontitis (chronic gum disease).
They also looked at blood markers like:
CRP (C-reactive protein)
D-dimer
White blood cell counts
These are all linked to inflammation and worse COVID outcomes.
They used logistic regression (predicting the probability of a binary outcome) to adjust for age, gender, health conditions, and habits, to isolate the effect of gum disease.
What Did They Find?
People with gum disease were:
9x more likely to die from COVID
3.5x more likely to end up in the ICU
4.5x more likely to need a ventilator
And even the inflammatory blood markers were higher in people with periodontitis.
Their bodies were already in a more inflamed state, which may have made the virus hit harder.
This DOES NOT mean gum disease causes death from COVID. There’s just a strong connection.
It looks like untreated gum disease may add to the inflammation that COVID-19 already causes, putting more stress on the body and possibly making the infection worse.
If you show up to a fight already bruised, your body’s not starting at 100%.
This was one of the easiest studies I’ve read so far, but also one of the most eye-opening.
I remember everyone talking about masks, vaccines, and hand sanitizer nonstop (rightfully), but I don’t remember anyone mentioning anything as little as checking your gums.
How many had it worse over something so hidden?
COVID hits underserved communities the hardest. And so does gum disease.
This paper shows how things connect in ways we don’t always see — and why oral health needs to be part of the bigger public health conversation.
Citation
Marouf N, Cai W, Said KN, et al.
Association between periodontitis and severity of COVID-19 infection: A case-control study.
J Clin Periodontol. 2021 Apr;48(4):483–491.