Our Oral Health May Determine Our Stomach Health
As your local dentist in Salmon Creek, Dr. Nelson strives to help educate his patients on the surprising ways that connect our oral and overall heath. Regular readers of our Salmon Creek Family Dental blog will know that we regularly highlight studies that show how the health of our teeth and gums impacts the health of our bodies as a whole. A recent study helps to further illustrate this connection by finding that chronic gastrointestinal problems may actually start due to what’s in a patient’s mouth. Published in the journal Science, the study – conducted by a panel of international researchers – reported on strains of oral bacteria that, when ingested in the 1.5 liters of saliva the average person consumes a day, can root in the stomach and cause the development of inflammatory bowel conditions like ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. “For some time now, we’ve noticed that when we look at the microbiome of patients with inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD, we’ve found microbes there that normally reside in the oral cavity,” wrote researchers. Researchers have spent many years attempting to identify genes associated with inflammatory bowel disease and determine which genetic variants increase a patient’s risk. Researchers discovered that certain types of bacteria can exist harmoniously when they stay in their natural environments. However, when those bacteria travel to foreign parts of the body – such as from the mouth to the stomach – they can become pathogenic. Identifying Troublesome Bacteria Researchers believe that have successfully identified two strains of the potentially problematic bacteria, Klebsiella, which is commonly found in the mouth. In the study, researchers administered saliva taken from two patients with Crohn’s disease to two groups of healthy mice. While one of the groups did not become ill, the other developed a strong immune response normally associated with Crohn’s. Examining the bacteria in that group’s saliva samples, researchers identified a strain of Klebsiella as responsible for the immune system response. Another follow up experiment using saliva samples taken from two patients suffering from ulcerative colitis identified another strain of Klebsiella as responsible for causing inflammation. By comparing the results of their study with a database that contained information on thousands of IBD patients at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, researchers discovered that patients suffering from inflammatory bowel conditions had significantly higher levels of Klebsiella in their stomach microbiomes when compared to healthy patients. To explain this connection, researchers hypothesized that oral bacteria – including Klebsiella – transitions to everyone’s stomach through the saliva they swallow each day. While the bacteria usually pass through harmlessly, patients with a genetic susceptibility to IBD that alters the microbiome of their stomachs, the bacteria have the opportunity to take hold in the intestine and begin to grow, causing an immune response that causes the disease to develop. Researchers also discovered that Klebsiella bacteria is often extremely resistant to a variety of antibiotics. That helps to explain why the use of antibiotics have only limited success in helping to treat patients suffering from ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s. In fact, researchers noted that the more resistant the bacteria becomes to antibiotics the more likely it is to cause an immune response. This supports the conclusion from a 2014 study that found patients who took antibiotics early to treat their bowel disease actually suffered from more severe outcomes. Improving Future Treatment Methods While more research is needed to confirm the results of this latest study, researchers believe this opens a useful path for the further investigation into the treatment of inflammatory diseases. “This is a direction that research on the role of the microbiome in inflammatory bowel disease – and many other diseases – should take,” commented researchers. “Once you identify these types of bugs, then you have a target.” Other studies are currently underway working on therapies designed to eliminate or remove these two strains of Klebsiella bacteria from the microbiome. So while the prevention of oral bacteria related disease usually starts with better oral hygiene, this appears a case where causation has more to do with nature than it does nurturing quality hygiene habits. Either way, this study further illustrates what your local dentist in Salmon Creek has been saying, what happens in the mouth really matters.
New Breakthrough Offers Hope of a Future Without Fillings
Few patients go looking for a dentist in Vancouver, WA hoping to have a cavity filled or implants placed. Unless a cavity has severely deteriorated the structure of a tooth, Dr. Nelson will generally treat the problem by removing the damaged part of the tooth before filling the hole with a porcelain or composite filling. While most fillings will last a lifetime, they do occasionally need replacing. But this asks the question – If filling a tooth with an artificial material really the best option? What if a tooth could actually repair itself using its own natural material – dentine? This is the question researcher from King’s College London asked themselves when researching how they could attempt to cause teeth to self-repair. Now it seems they may have found a process that could actually help teeth repair themselves, which could lead to a future where dental fillings join rotary phones as a relic of the past. The Future of Self-Repairing Teeth Researchers from King’s College say their new treatment for repairing cavities is remarkably simple. It involves the use of a drug that causes the tooth to fill in the hole caused by a cavity naturally with dentine. “[The process] involves putting a drug on a little sponge that goes inside the tooth, in the hole that the dentist made. It stimulates this natural process, which is starting to occur anyway following the damage, but it over-activates the process so you actually get the big hole repaired and the repair is a production of the natural material, the dentine,” says Paul Sharpe, lead research involved in the study, in a paper published in Scientific Reports. In most cases, a new drug requires repeated testing before it meets with approval from oversight agencies like the Food and Drug Administration or the American Dental Association. However, the drug used by researchers to regrow tooth enamel – Tideglusib – has already earned approval for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other nervous system disorder. While the drug will still need additional approval to be used to treat tooth decay, the fact that it has already been cleared for use means that the days of dental fillings could be coming to an end sooner than anyone would have predicted. Researchers explain that the process for using Tideglusib to repair teeth requires only a small amount of the drug. Researchers have developed a technique for applying the drug directly to the area of the tooth affected by decay. Using a biodegradable collagen sponge to deliver treatment, the team applied low doses of the drug to the tooth. They discovered that the sponge degraded over time and as the sponge dissolved it was replaced by newly grown dentin, leading to a natural and complete self-repair. Collagen sponges are clinically-approved and commercially-available, another factor in why this new form of treatment may become the preferred way for a dentist in Vancouver, WA to repair cavities in the near future. “The simplicity of our approach makes it ideal as a clinical dental product for the natural treatment of large cavities, by providing both pulp protection and restoring dentine,” says professor Sharpe. Importance of Preventative Care While dental fillings may become a thing of the past, you shouldn’t consider this type of breakthrough a reason for ignoring your oral health. Daily brushing and flossing significantly lowers your risk for a variety of long-term health issues that carry far more of a lasting impact than a simple cavity. Studies have shown that patients suffering from tooth decay and gum disease have a higher risk of heart attack, stroke, dementia, and diabetes. So even if you no longer need to worry about visiting a dentist in Vancouver, WA for a filling, that doesn’t mean protecting your oral health should become less important now or in the future.
Drinking Soda May Cause Kidney Disease
In recent years, soft drinks have come under intense scrutiny. Whether from states like California trying to pass a tax on soda or critics that blame so called “Mountain Dew Mouth” – a condition commonly found in the Appalachian region of the U.S. and named after the area’s most popular beverage – as destroying the oral health of individuals too poor to receive regular Salmon Creek dental care, soft drinks have started to develop a poor reputation among health experts across the globe. Studies have already found frequent soda consumption dramatically increases an individual’s risk of developing a number of chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and gum disease. Now two new studies suggest that a soda habit may increase a person’s risk of developing kidney disease. Troubling Evidence Employees at a Japanese university who consumed over two sodas a day were more likely to have protein in their urine when compared to individuals that drank two or fewer or no soda on a daily basis. It’s viewed as an early, but reversible, marker of kidney damage when protein is found in urine. While this new study found a link between soda consumption and an increased risk of kidney damage, it didn’t prove conclusively that soda was responsible. The study involved over 12,000 university personnel who participated in yearly checkups at the school’s health center. As part of the checkup, each employee had his or her urine screened for protein. Researchers found that of the university employees who admitted consuming more than two sodas a day, 11 percent tested positive for protein in their urine during the three years the study was conducted. In contrast, 8.4 percent of participants who reported not drinking soda daily and nearly 9 percent of those who reported drinking an average of one soda a day tested positive for protein in their urine. A second related study involving rats found that moderate consumption of the sugar fructose – found in most brands of soda – increased the kidney’s sensitivity to a specific protein that helps to regulate salt in the body. According to researchers at Case Western Reserve University who led the study, this leads to kidney cells absorbing more salt, which could explain why drinking soda has been linked to high blood pressure, kidney failure, obesity, gum disease, and diabetes. Commenting on the study’s findings, researchers at Ohio State University weighed in to say that the affects of soda consumption seem to threaten even healthy individuals and not just those with an increased risk of developing kidney disease. Researchers suspect sodas that contain high-fructose corn syrup present the biggest health risk to consumers. Because fructose is sweeter than glucose, and since it doesn’t satisfy cravings – leading people to consume more – fructose may harm the body differently than glucose, damaging the kidneys instead of raising blood sugar levels. No Safe Solution Due to the high levels of sugar these types of beverages contain, researchers warn that no amount of soda consumption should be considered safe or acceptable. Guidelines that set forth acceptable levels of sugar consumption fall well below the amount of sugar just one bottle of soda contains. Guidelines set by the American Heart Association, for example, limit daily sugar intake to nine teaspoons for adult males, five teaspoons for female adults, and three teaspoons for children. A 20-ounce bottle of soda contains nearly 12 teaspoons of sugar, 33 percent more than recommended for adult men and four times the amount children should ingest daily. The high levels of sugar and acid soda contains also make a daily soda habit detrimental to an individual’s oral health, in addition to increasing the risk of several chronic diseases. The bottom line according to researchers is that most people need to start drinking more water instead of soda, unless they want to receive more Salmon Creek dental care then they’re used to needing.