Is caries contagious?
It is generally known that diseases caused by viral or bacterial pathogens are contagious. However, most people are not aware that this also applies to caries. Caries is a dental disease caused by bacterial pathogens.
According to the World Health Organization, tooth decay is the most widespread infectious disease of all. It is estimated that about 95 percent of the world population is affected. All people are initially born without the caries-causing bacteria.
However, since this disease is contagious, the bacterial pathogens must first enter the oral cavity. Usually, the transmission of the relevant pathogens already takes place in early childhood. Especially the sharing of cutlery or cleaning a pacifier with the mother’s saliva is one of the most common ways of transmission.
After transmission, the caries-causing bacteria settle within the oral cavity of the child, multiply and persist there for years. It can be assumed that there is a direct correlation between caries rate and age at infection. The earlier the infectious bacteria are transmitted, the higher the later caries rate can be. According to studies, about 89 percent of the children who were infected in the early years of life got caries before the age of five. Caries is therefore a widespread infectious disease that is highly contagious.
Symptoms
The symptoms of caries cannot be clearly assigned to a pattern, but are dependent on the stage of the disease due to their long duration of action. At the beginning, the patient does not even know that he or she is suffering from it, because pain does not occur at first. The food intake can be followed as usual without feeling anything when drinking very cold or even hot drinks.But it is already visible, namely in the form of small white dots.
If these are discovered by chance, for example during regular check-ups by a dentist, there is a very good chance that they can be treated without any further effort and very gently, so that they can be prevented from entering the next stage. Over time, these whitish discolorations become more and more visible and the patient also feels the first symptoms. Pain occurs periodically, i.e. it disappears for a certain period of time, but also returns.
The phases of non-occurrence become less frequent until the pain becomes permanent. Eating and drinking turns out to be more unpleasant from time to time. Especially hot or cold drinks, sweet and sticky food or even acidic fruit drive the pain into your face when consumed and there is no longer any question of pleasure.
You grab the spot from the outside with your hand and are happy when nothing touches this spot anymore. The caries can spread to the surrounding tissue, so that the pain becomes even stronger. Another symptom is a foul smell from the mouth.
The tricky thing about the development of caries is that pain only occurs at a very advanced stage. Before that, the tooth is almost symptomless, which means that the person affected does not even notice the carious lesion. The first phase, in which the caries is still reversible, is not even noticed by the patient and is more likely to be discovered as a chance finding during the dental checkup.
In most cases, pain is not felt until the caries reaches the dentin through the enamel. In the dentine there are small canals that are connected to the tooth pulp, through which the bacteria can quickly reach the pulp. The nerves within the pulp react to the stimulus created by the bacteria and the patient feels pain.
This pain is intensified in the short term by food with a high sugar content, and particularly cold drinks and food can also cause the symptoms. The pain has a pulling, stabbing character, but only of short duration and on special occasions such as eating. X-rays are a diagnostic tool for the dentist to detect caries.
Especially in places that are not visible from the outside, such as the tooth surfaces between the teeth, the dentist can detect caries with the help of bite wing images. In the X-ray image, caries can be recognized as a dark spot in the crown of the tooth or at the root, which stands out from the rest of the tooth. However, an initial developing caries can hardly be detected in an X-ray image, only when the enamel surface is broken down can this be detected in radiation diagnostics. For this reason, regular x-rays based on the general examination about every two years are quite useful in order to detect caries development at an early stage and to treat it in a targeted manner, because even the dentist cannot always optimally examine and assess all tooth surfaces.