Clinical experiments have supported the idea that salivary levels of NLRP3 and IL-1β can be used as a measure of the extent of periodontal tissue destruction (Mitra et al., 2022; Abraham et al., 2023), suggesting that NLRP3 inflammasome activation induced by an imbalance of M1/M2 macrophages may be involved in the pathogenesis of periodontitis. Here, NLRP3 is linked to periodontitis.