Evaluation of Salivary Total Antioxidant Capacity in Smokers with Severe Chronic Periodontitis

Background: Smoking leads to changes in immune reaction and total antioxidant capacity. Smoking, through dysfunction of antioxidant system, plays an important role in the pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases. Objectives: The current study aimed at comparing salivary antioxidant capacity in smokers and non-smokers with severe chronic periodontitis. Patients and Methods: In this case-control study, among patients referred to Zahedan School of Dentistry without any systemic diseases, 64 patients with severe chronic periodontitis, including 27 smokers as the case group and 37 non-smokers as the control group, were selected. Stimulated salivary samples were collected and total antioxidant levels were evaluated through the Ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) technique. All analyses were performed by SPSS (Ver.18) using Student’s t-test, Mann Whitney test or analysis of variance (ANOVA) with significance level of 0.05 in all of the tests. Results: Total antioxidant capacity in smokers (378.43 ± 207.34 µM) with severe chronic periodontitis was significantly lower than non-smokers (698.30 ± 231.86 µM) (P = 0.0001). Smoking at a rate of more than 10 cigarettes per day caused a significant decrease in total antioxidant capacity as compared to less than 10 cigarettes a day (P = 0.009), although there was no significant relationship between total antioxidant capacity and duration of smoking (P = 0.23). Conclusion: smoking has an influence on antioxidant status in patients with severe chronic periodontitis. Smoking could be effective in development and progression of inflammation process through changes in oxidative stress. These findings confirm the benefits of smoking-cessation in improvement of antioxidant levels in periodontitis.