Science doesn't know how oral disease is related to cancer. But we've seen enough math over the past decade or so of study to know that there's definitely something going on in your mouth that can make you vulnerable to cancer -- even decades later. We're going to lay out the most commonly-accepted theory for you.
The Inflammation Theory
The mouth is a place of almost constant microscopic injuries. For example, something as simple as eating popcorn can cause hundreds of tiny scrapes and cuts on the gums and roof of the mouth. Furthermore, the inside of the mouth is naturally home to hundreds of kinds of bacteria and microbes -- some of which the body considers hostile. When those hostile microbes get into those tiny injuries, it causes a low-grade infection that can literally last for years if you keep re-scraping up the inside of your mouth.
That infection, in turn, leads to a constant low-grade inflammation. Inflamed cells don't respond as well to normal inter-cellular chemical signals, including the signal that tells the cell to die if it starts to act abnormally. If something unusual happens to a cell that causes it to act like a cancer cell, and then the normal self-protection message fails to kill the cell, it can become cancerous. Thus, oral bacteria act as an enabler of carcinogenesis.
The major flaw in this theory is that it doesn't explain why one of the inflamed cells may start to act like a cancer cell. It assumes that, essentially, cells in your body are constantly 'going rogue', starting to act like cancer cells, and then getting killed by your own body. Interestingly, this is another commonly-accepted theory about how cancer works, but when you build one theory on top of another unproven theory, you have to take the whole thing with several grains of salt.
That doesn't mean that there's a flaw in the math -- there's definitely a relationship between oral disease and cancer -- it just means we don't know exactly why.
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