Periodontal disease the loss of the bone that supports and holds in your teeth through bacterial infection.
How does that happen?
You always have bacteria in your mouth. This bacteria likes to congregate together and make a layer on your teeth. This is a bacterial biofilm, we also call it plaque. The plaque on your teeth and gums irritates your gums. Plaque is soft, it’s the fuzzy feeling on your teeth when you haven’t brushed for a while. Over time plaque takes in minerals that are always present in your saliva. This causes the plaque to harden which turns it into tartar (also called calculus). Once the bacteria is hardened into calculus it’s almost impossible to brush it off and it needs to be removed with a professional tooth cleaning. If this buildup of plaque and tartar continues it will not only infect and irritate your gums, but will start to infect and irritate the bone and ligaments below the gums. When the gums are infected and irritated they get puffy, red, bleed easily and can be tender. This is what we call gingivitis. When the bone get infected and irritated your body deals with this by getting rid of the infected bone. The result of that is that you have less bone holding in your teeth. Once you start losing bone and tooth supporting structures we call that periodontal disease.