Oral microbiota: Discovering and facing the new associations with systemic diseases

Abstract

The economic crisis of the first decades of the 2000s had serious repercussions on the economy of individual countries, producing a gradual impoverishment of populations. The reduction in financial resources has significantly reduced citizens’ access to care, forcing them to abandon preventive medicine treatments and check-ups. The health of the oral cavity, which had long been considered of secondary importance when compared with systemic pathologies whose course can be potentially fatal for the patient, has therefore been strongly neglected. In recent years, however, new mechanisms of etiology of systemic diseases have been studied with the aim of evaluating some aspects still unknown. The microbiota, whose interest has grown considerably in the national scientific community, was immediately considered as a key factor in the pathogenesis of some disorders. These analyses have also benefited from numerous advances in the field of crop and molecular diagnostics in the microbiological field. Although pioneering studies have focused on the microbiota of the gastro-intestinal system, subsequent evidence has also been drawn from various studies conducted on the oral microbiota. What emerged is that oral microbiota dysbiosis has been associated with numerous systemic diseases. Therefore, the purpose of this Special Issue is to encourage scientific research on the topic of the relationship between the oral microbiota and systemic diseases, also inviting the use of new techniques for culture and molecular diagnosis. Particular attention will be given to original works in vivo and to literature reviews provided they are carried out with a systematic approach and, if possible, supported by additional quantitative analyses.