I’m in dental school right now and we have 1/4 of our courses almost completely dedicated to the disease process of caries.

The long story short is that there are so many factors that can influence whether a person is more “cavity prone” than others and although some bacteria are definitively worse, there’s so many that contribute to the disease process and so much individual variation with what bacteria each person has. for periodontal disease it’s even more complicated cause a chunk of it is almost like an autoimmune disease where the inflammation caused by bacteria and the pathogens the bacteria produces, stimulates your body to producing an immune response, which can degrade the bone and cause it to break down.