Chronic periodontitis and the subsequent risk of trigeminal neuralgia: a 5-year follow-up study.

Objective: This study set out to explore the possibility that chronic periodontitis (CP) may also be a condition that could potentially result in secondary or symptomatic trigeminal neuralgia (TN) by utilizing a population-based dataset and cohort study design in Taiwan.

Methods: We included 110,104 subjects with CP in our study cohort, and randomly selected 110,104 subjects without a history of CP as a comparison cohort. We individually tracked each patient in this study for a 5-year period to identify those who received a subsequent diagnosis of TN.

Results: The incidence rate of TN during the 5-year follow-up period was 4.40 (95% CI = 3.87-4.98) per 10,000 person-years for subjects with CP, and 2.60 (95% CI = 2.20-3.05) per 10,000 person-years in comparison subjects. Cox proportional analysis revealed that the adjusted hazard ratio (HR) of TN during the 5-year follow-up period for subjects with CP was 1.65 (95% CI = 1.34-2.03) times higher than that of comparison subjects. However, the study subjects who had undergone a gingivectomy or periodontal flap operation did not have a higher adjusted risk of TN than comparison subjects (HR = 0.93, 95% CI = 0.54-1.61).

Conclusions: Our study detected a greater risk for TN among patients with CP than matched comparison subjects.