Discovering medical conditions associated with periodontitis using linked electronic health records.

Aim To use linked electronic medical and dental records to discover associations between periodontitis and medical conditions independent of a priori hypotheses. Materials and Methods This case-control study included 2475 patients who underwent dental treatment at the College of Dental Medicine at Columbia University and medical treatment at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Our cases are patients who received periodontal treatment and our controls are patients who received dental maintenance but no periodontal treatment. Chi-square analysis was performed for medical treatment codes and logistic regression was used to adjust for confounders. Results Our method replicated several important periodontitis associations in a largely Hispanic population, including diabetes mellitus type I ( OR = 1.6, 95% CI 1.30-1.99, p < 0.001) and type II ( OR = 1.4, 95% CI 1.22-1.67, p < 0.001), hypertension ( OR = 1.2, 95% CI 1.10-1.37, p < 0.001), hypercholesterolaemia ( OR = 1.2, 95% CI 1.07-1.38, p = 0.004), hyperlipidaemia ( OR = 1.2, 95% CI 1.06-1.43, p = 0.008) and conditions pertaining to pregnancy and childbirth ( OR = 2.9, 95% CI: 1.32-7.21, p = 0.014). We also found a previously unreported association with benign prostatic hyperplasia ( OR = 1.5, 95% CI 1.05-2.10, p = 0.026) after adjusting for age, gender, ethnicity, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, lipid and circulatory system conditions, alcohol and tobacco abuse. Conclusions This study contributes a high-throughput method for associating periodontitis with systemic diseases using linked electronic records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]