Perio-Cardio Workshop

The Perio-Cardio Workshop, which explored the links between periodontal disease and cardiovascular disease and drawed up a series of recommendations, took place in Madrid, Spain, on 18 and 19 February 2019. The workshop was organised jointly by the European Federation of Periodontology (EFP) and the World Heart Federation (WHF) in partnership with Dentaid.

More than 20 experts from the two organisations reviewed scientific papers and produced a number of consensus reports, building on the groundbreaking work of the EFP’s Perio Workshop 2012, which explored the links between periodontitis and systemic conditions including cardiovascular diseases. This knowledge was updated in order to create specific recommendations for medical and oral-health practitioners.

Participants in the Perio-Cardio Workshop focused their efforts on four areas:

1. The epidemiological evidence of the links between periodontitis and cardiovascular diseases;
2. The biological mechanisms of the increased risk of developing atherosclerosis lesions in patients with periodontitis;
3. The effect of intervention trials on atherosclerosis risk parameters;
4. The potential cardiovascular risks of oral interventions.

The workshop was organised into two working groups:

Working group 1, chaired by Mariano Sanz (EFP) and José Ramón Gonzålez Juanatey (WHF), covered epidemiology and mechanisms; and
Working group 2, chaired by Søren Jepsen (EFP) and Francisco Fernández-Avilés (WHF), evaluated treatment and complications.).

The conclusions and recommendations of the Perio-Cardio Workshop were published in the Journal of Clinical Periodontology, the official EFP journal which has an impact factor of 4.046.

An outreach project, also sponsored by Dentaid, is now being developed to disseminate the content of this workshop among various stakeholders and target groups (oral-healthcare professionals, physicians, pharmacists, researchers, media, patients, and the public).