Pregnancy Tooth Loss From Bacteria?

Pregnancy causes a lot of changes to a woman's body. But have you ever heard of pregnancy making women lose their teeth?

If you have heard that pregnancy can make women lose their teeth then you probably know someone who had it happen to them, whether a mother or grandmother or other family member. Or you just know a random fun fact about pregnancy. No matter where you heard it from, you probably have heard that the cause of mothers losing their teeth is because the baby is taking calcium from the mother.

But what if I told you that it wasn't the baby that might be the cause of this issue, but rather the other tiny little organisms living in a person's body? The little organisms are none other than the bacteria that make up your body and live there on their own.

Your mouth is covered in bacteria, and these bacteria create something called a microbiome, which is just a fancy way of saying an area of your body where a regular group of bacteria hang out.

Researchers at a university in Israel describe that a lot of changes occur in the oral microbiome when a woman goes through pregnancy. In the first trimester a woman might not want to eat a lot because of morning sickness, or a mother might stop taking certain medications as well. It has even been noted that saliva becomes more acidic during pregnancy.

Typically, the oral microbiome is stable, and would decrease in diversity slowly, over the years. But the researchers at the university in Israel explain that pregnancy acts as a fast-track to this decrease in diversity. Even inflammation and changes in hormones can disrupt the microbiome of the mouth. These changes in environment could be linked to the dental issues that can go along with pregnancy.

What researchers hope to do is map out what a normal microbiome of a pregnant woman looks like. They plan to track this baseline throughout all three trimesters of a pregnancy. Establishing a baseline and understanding of what a normal pregnant oral microbiome consists of could help researchers detect when pregnant women are starting to deviate from normal, and prevent them from losing their teeth.