We are proud to say that Dr. Manali Vora was our very second guest ever to appear on the Dental Digest Podcast.

Dr. Vora is a dentist and an epidemiologist. She formerly served as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at University of California, San Francisco. She is now periodontics resident at the University of Connecticut.

During her time at UCSF, she has focused her research program on periodontal health outcomes and substance use. One of her projects as a post-doctoral fellow was to evaluate if non-cigarette tobacco product users are more likely to report gum disease and gum disease treatment compared to people who have never used tobacco.

She earned her DDS in Dental Surgery from Gujarat University, India in 2014. She obtained her MPH in Epidemiology at University of Washington, Seattle. 

This project’s findings were published in the Journal of American Dental Association in 2019. Her other projects are about identifying predictors of change in tobacco use behavior over time and describing how tobacco industry funding is influencing the increased acceptance of novel tobacco products.

We recommend you read Dr. Vora’s article entitled “Tobacco-use patterns and self-reported oral health outcomes: A cross-sectional assessment of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health study.” This article was featured on the cover of the Journal of the American Dental Association. She also discussed her findings on the podcast.

In this article she stated the following: “Dental clinicians should anticipate various tobacco use patterns among their patients, all of which may impact oral health. Dental professionals should remain informed, screen for and address use of all tobacco products in practice…

Dental professionals can expect to encounter patients using a range of tobacco products, including emerging non-traditional products, as well as dual and poly use of products, all of which have potential to contribute to oral diseases. Based on the findings of the present study, nearly all of these tobacco-use behaviors were associated with self-reported oral disease history, although whether those associations are causal in nature awaits further investigation.”

Find out if Dr. Vora’s episode of the Dental Digest Podcast is eligible for dental continuing education (CE) credit.

Thank you so much for joining us on the Podcast, Dr. V!