Diagnosed Dental Diseases, Tooth Loss and the Risk of Primary Liver Cancer in a Nationwide Swedish Cohort.

Authors

Qiaofeng Zhong, Zengliang Ruan, Li Yin, Hans-Olov Adami, Weimin Ye

Published in

Journal of clinical periodontology. Oct 25, 2026. Epub Oct 25, 2026.

Abstract

Poor dental health has been shown to increase the risk of several types of cancer, but its association with primary liver cancer (PLC) remains unclear. We aimed to evaluate the association between dental diseases, tooth loss and the risk of PLC.
We conducted a large population-based retrospective cohort study including 5,893,325 adults registered in the Swedish Dental Health Register between 2009 and 2016. Participants were linked to multiple Swedish national registers to ascertain incident PLC cases. Cox regression analyses were performed to evaluate the association between dental diseases, tooth loss and the risk of PLC, using attained age as the timescale and adjusting for potential confounders. Additionally, in a sibling comparison analysis we controlled for shared genetic and early-life environmental factors.
During a mean follow-up of 6.36 years, 2374 PLC cases were identified through linkage with the Cancer Register: 1856 hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and 518 non-HCC PLC cases. Both caries (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.15, 95% CI: 1.02-1.30) and periodontitis (HR = 1.25, 95% CI: 1.12-1.39) were associated with an increased risk of PLC. Further, a clear dose-response relationship was observed between fewer remaining teeth and PLC risk, with HRs ranging from 1.15 to 1.84 (p < 0.001) for individuals with fewer teeth compared with those with > 27 remaining teeth. Subtype-specific analyses showed that caries was associated with non-HCC PLC, whereas periodontitis was associated with HCC. Tooth loss was more strongly associated with HCC than with non-HCC PLC. The overall findings were generally consistent across sibling-controlled, subgroup, and sensitivity analyses.
Our large population-based cohort study suggests that caries, periodontitis and tooth loss are associated with an elevated risk of PLC, with distinct patterns of association observed for HCC and non-HCC PLC.

PMID:
42927980
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 26 Oct 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.