The Medical History Form and Salivary Diagnostics

A medical history form is a starting point to guide conversations and to make connections between oral health and overall health. Consider re-configuring your current medical history form to quickly be able to visualize oral systemic connections and/ or concerns. These 5 questions should be asked on your current health history form.

1) Has a parent, sibling or grandparent had a heart attack or stroke? Yes__ No__
2) Has a parent, sibling or grandparent had diabetes? Yes__ No__
3) Has a parent, sibling or grandparent had periodontal disease? Yes__ No__
4) Has a parent, sibling or grandparent had COPD? Yes__ No__
5) Has a parent, sibling or grandparent had cancer? Yes__ No__

What do all these questions have in common? Inflammation. The answers provided by the patient indicate a predisposing genetic background for inflammatory disease .These questions help to determine risk and when coupled with a salivary diagnostic tests such as a pathogen analysis, (i.e. MyPerioPath) and a genetic risk assessment test like Celsus One, you have an even more complete picture. Asking these questions and having them grouped near or at the beginning of the medical history form allows for the dental professional to quickly evaluate a patient’s predisposition for inflammatory disease.

Once high risk patients are identified, oral systemic periodontal treatment planning is crucial. Consulting the medical history and the salivary test results, enables a dental professional to create an individualized successful systemic periodontal plan for a patient. Through the use of a well-developed medical history and salivary diagnostics results, dental professionals are uniquely positioned to help guide a patient not only to reduce oral inflammation but total body systemic inflammation as well, thus potentially extending lifespans.

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Traci Warner, RDH
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