ARE E-CIGARETTES LESS DANGEROUS TO ORAL HEALTH THAN CIGARETTES? Don’t bet on it, says Dr. Purnima Kumar Purnima Kumar, BDS, ’05 MS, ’05 PhD, has for years studied the impact of cigarette smoking on periodontal health and disease. As e-cigarettes have surged in popularity, the Ohio State College of Dentistry clinician-scientist has now turned her attention to their impact on oral health—with startling findings.
Your current research into e-cigarettes and vaping was preceded by your research on cigarette smoking. Why were you interested in smoking? To me, smoking has both a professional and very personal connection. My father was a lifelong smoker and died from complications related to smoking. He was the bravest man I knew—an officer in the Air Force who had been in three wars—and yet could not conquer a habit. On a professional level, I’m a periodontist, and a lot of people I treat are smokers. I have been a dental surgeon for 30 years now, but for these patients, the outcomes of surgery are not good at all. The question is always: Why are their outcomes so poor? What does smoking do to your mouth to cause disease and to impede efforts in treating the disease?
How did you then become interested in e-cigarettes? When e-cigarettes were introduced into the marketplace, we quickly found that there were no data out there about them. There was nothing known. We started by studying e-cigarettes only in people who don’t have gum disease. We wanted to know what happens to you when you’re healthy and start this habit.
What happens when people start using e-cigarettes? The first thing we looked at was how e-cigarettes change the friendly bacteria in the mouth. We found that they make these bacteria completely toxic. Even the good bacteria in the mouth when exposed to vapor produced a gelatinous goo—they get very stressed. I grew bacteria from my own mouth in a petri dish under different conditions. When there’s no e-cigarette vapor, I can brush it off with a toothbrush. But when exposed to vaping, the bacteria starts looking like phlegm. As a periodontist, I’m seeing people who use e-cigarettes in their mid-twenties and thirties who have receding gums and need gum grafts. Gum grafts never work well on these patients, so now I’m studying what e-cigarettes may do to deter wound healing. We are taking people who vape and giving them a highly standardized 17
