Psychosocial stress and epigenetic aging as common pathways to oral disease and multimorbidity

Previous studies show that good oral health is key for general health, suggesting that oral diseases can co-occur with other major health problems, such as diabetes, heart disease or Alzheimer’s disease. Stressful life experiences have been suggested to contribute to poor health through triggering the stress response resulting in alteration of biological processes including accelerating the aging process, in which one’s apparent age is older than their actual chronological age. Whether stressful experiences and biological aging contribute to oral diseases and other general health conditions in older Canadians is unknown. Therefore, our proposed study aims to investigate whether general health conditions and oral diseases can co-occur in the same individuals, and whether stressful experiences and biological aging can contribute to the co-occurence of these conditions.