Public Health Aspects of Periodontitis: Recent Advances and Contributions by Dr. Robert J. Genco.

Purpose of review: This review provides an overview of the objectives, activities and accomplishments of the CDC-AAP collaboration on public health aspects of periodontitis focusing mostly on surveillance. Dr. Robert Genco was co-chair of this effort.

Recent findings: This initiative developed new standard periodontitis case definitions for surveillance and implemented for the first time a full-mouth periodontal examination protocol for NHANES 2009 -2014. Measurements from this survey resulted in significantly greater estimate for the national prevalence of periodontitis in US adults and our understanding of population risk factors associations with periodontitis. Notably, this initiative also developed, and validated field-testing a battery of eight questions for multivariable modeling of self-report measures for predicting periodontitis in populations.

Summary: This Initiative resulted in significant improvements of surveillance of periodontitis and produced unique findings with important implications for advancing our understanding of population aspects of periodontitis in US adults at the national, state, and local levels.