Dental Care

Maintaining good oral health practices will help keep your heart healthy.

You should brush and floss your teeth regularly. Going to the dentist may not be your favourite thing to do, but good dental habits and regular check-ups with your dentist are both important for your heart.

If you don’t have dental insurance, many dental and dental hygiene programs offer services free of charge or at a reduced rate. You can ask your doctor or nurse if this is available in your community.

Your teeth and your heart share the same blood supply. This means that the same bacteria that causes cavities can travel to the heart and cause an infection called endocarditis. People with artificial heart valves or other artificial materials in their hearts and those with cyanotic (blue) CHD are most at risk.

Some people with CHD are recommended to take antibiotics before dental visits and procedures. We think that all patients should ask their doctor or nurse about this..

To learn more:

Adult Congenital Heart Association - CHD & dental issues

American Academy of Pediatrics - Dental care for children (and teens!) with CHD

This website is designed specifically for young people with congenital heart disease. The goal is to provide information to help people who are getting ready to move (or have recently moved) to adult heart care. We use the term ‘transition’ to describe this process. Family, friends and health care providers may also find this website helpful.

Please be advised this site does not provide medical advice. All of the content on this website is provided for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have or suspect you have a health problem, please consult your family physician. If you have or suspect you are experiencing a health emergency, please promptly visit a Hospital Emergency Department in your area. Reliance on any information provided on or provided in relation to the site is solely at your own risk. Contributors to this website are not responsible, nor liable, for any claim, loss or damage arising from the use of the information contained within this site.

Any websites linked from this website are created by other organizations. Those organizations are responsible for the information contained within their sites. We are not responsible for the content of linked third-party sites or third-party advertisements and do not make any representations regarding their content or accuracy. Your use of third-party websites is at your own risk and subject to the terms and conditions of use for such sites. Any specific comments regarding these sites should be directed toward that individual organization.

We have a simple ‘Getting to Know You’ survey that we ask all visitors to complete (we don’t ask for any personal health information). Website browsing activity will be monitored so that we can learn about the people who visit the website, how often people visit the website, and the web pages that are visited most often. This will help us decide which changes and improvements to make to the website in the future. Results from this project will be described for groups of website visitors (i.e., not for individual users).

Anyone can visit this website and most users will create their own User IDs and passwords. However, there are also Adult Congenital Heart Disease (ACHD) and pediatric cardiology programs that have officially joined the iHeartChange team and work together to keep this website going. (You can find a list of the ACHD programs in the ‘Welcome to Adult Care’ section of the website). Some of these programs might choose to assign User IDs so that they can track of and how patients from their own programs visit the website. They might even want to track this for research. If you have been assigned a User ID from a program, that program might ask us to give them information about your answers to the ‘Getting to Know You’ survey, how many times you log into the website and which web pages you visit.

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