In an National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of 128 post-menopausal women, who exhibited both local (periodontitis) and systemic (osteopenia) bone loss, a 2 year regimen of this proposed therapeutic strategy significantly reduced biomarkers of systemic inflammation (hsCRP and MMP-9 in their blood samples), as well as reducing local (GCF) and systemic (blood) levels of collagenolytic enzymes (MMP-8) and bone resorption biomarkers (ICTP, carboxy-terminal telopeptide fragments of type I collagen) [10,12,13,14]. Here, MMP8 is linked to periodontitis.