Medicine and dentistry are moving toward personalized, or precision, approaches to care, which involve properly classifying people to effectively customize prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Achieving precision health requires making sense of big data at both the population and molecular levels. This podcast explains the concept of biologically informed stratification of periodontal disease and the role it can play in accelerating the development of precision oral medicine.

After completing this podcast, listeners should be able to:

• Gain an understanding of the concept of biologically informed stratification of periodontal disease and its implications for preventing, predicting, and managing periodontitis.

Data that describe the periodontal microbiome in elderly individuals are lacking. This presentation reviews the primary findings from an ancillary study of oral health in dentate individuals older than 65 years, with a focus on subgingival bacterial patterns and their relation to the severity and extent of periodontitis.

After completing this podcast, listeners should be able to:

• Identify key observations from the WHICAP Ancillary Study of Oral Health, as they relate to subgingival bacterial profiles and clinical periodontal status in a cohort of elderly individuals (>65 years old).

Globally, periodontitis is one of the most prevalent chronic inflammatory diseases. Both the inflammation and microbial dysbiosis that occur in periodontal disease can lead to compromised barrier function of the gingival epithelia. This podcast reviews how the pathogen P. gingivalis disrupts barrier function of epithelial cells by inducing epigenetic alterations and identifies potential treatments, for further investigation, to inhibit these events.

After completing this podcast, listeners should be able to:

• Understand how infection with P. gingivalis induces epigenetic changes that alter gene expression, and how this knowledge has led to potential new strategies to treat periodontal disease.