When you visit a dental clinic, the dentist checks your blood pressure before initiating the treatment. Whatever the reason for your dental visit is, a routine check-up or extracting a decayed tooth or any surgical treatments, your dentist will begin the treatment by taking your blood pressure. You might think, “What is this for?”
Keep reading to know the answer on why dentists and oral hygienists take blood pressure at the start.
Will blood pressure intervene in dental treatments?
High Blood pressure is a serious illness. Everyone knows that normal blood pressure is important for a healthy life and it increases due to various reasons. When the blood pressure increases, the nutritional compounds carried by blood could not be supplied to the tissues through the vessels.
Remember that the minerals provided by blood are essential for healing tissues. It means blood pressure can delay the recovery period of dental treatments you take.
Besides this, dentists note the blood pressure readings of a patient for the following reasons:
1) Handling dental anxiety
People who are anxious about dental treatments can create stressful feelings during dental procedures. Blood pressure normally increases with stress and it affects the dental works performed by a dentist. To avoid such disruptions, dentists try to pinpoint the prehypertensive numbers using the blood pressure cuff.
It shows whether a patient has issues like hypertension or circumstances that might instigate the blood pressure. In such cases, dental doctors can customize their treatment plans to avoid dental risks associated with high blood pressure.
2) Managing local anesthetics
Our body produces an endogenous substance called “Epinephrine” in emergencies that cause fear or anger. When this enzyme is introduced into the bloodstream, it causes increases in the heart rate, alters the sugar metabolism, and makes some changes inside our body that elevates the hypertension levels.
On the other hand, the local anesthetics used for numbing in dental treatments also contain epinephrine. It also tends to increase blood pressure. It clearly shows that when BP patients receive an overdose of anesthetic agents, they will be at risk of a medical emergency.
Hypertension is asymptomatic hence many people are unaware of high blood pressure levels. When dentists observe this before treatments, they can adjust the dose of anesthetics.
3) Dentists can cope with the patient’s discomforts
In certain cases, people who do not have dental anxiety also scare and feel discomfort with the instruments their dentists equip. Such discomforts lead to increased blood pressure that will disturb the oral treatment’s bodily response. It may end in serious bodily disorders. So dentists establish a baseline for patients according to their blood pressure levels before beginning the treatments or injecting medications.
Bottom line
In simply, high blood pressure is also detrimental to our oral health and can affect the dental treatments we receive. Identifying such high BP levels before a dental care treatment will help dentists to make a custom-made treatment plan or postponing the treatment for the patient’s well-being.
