Impact of stress on clinical outcomes of non-surgical periodontal therapy in patients with severe generalized periodontitis

Abstract

Relevance.Aim – to assess the impact of psychosocial stress on the clinical outcomes in severe periodontitis patients treated with Nonsurgical Periodontal Therapy (NPT).Materials and methods.Patients received 2 psychological questionnaires to score their stress levels, while clinical data were obtained 1 week before and six weeks after the completion of NPT.Results.A total of 55 patients were consecutively included in the study and subsequently categorized into different stress levels (low stress level n = 22 and moderate/high stress level n = 33). All clinical parameters were found to be comparable at baseline between groups. While reduction in full-mouth bleeding scores was found to be statistically significantly lower in group with higher stress levels, a similar improvement in the other clinical parameters was observed at the completion of NPT.Conclusion.Psychosocial stress seems to influence negatively the results of NPT and highly stressed patients may represent a risk category for disease progression.