Since the start of the pandemic, there’s been a fair amount of talk about how spiking stress levels seem to have contributed to more dental problems. More than 70% of dentists surveyed saw an increase of patients experiencing teeth grinding and clenching,...
A Mediterranean diet is an anti-inflammatory one, so you’d think that it might be especially helpful in lowering the risk of gum disease, which is marked by chronic inflammation and linked with other inflammatory conditions. That’s exactly what a new study in the...
Once upon a time, if you said that conditions in the mouth could have any kind of impact on whole body health, folks might have looked at you funny. Because of the historic divide between dentistry and medicine, the mouth was long treated almost as if it didn’t...
When you go to give blood, you’re screened for risk factors that could make the donation unsafe. Donations are also tested for bacteria, viruses, and such - tests which must all be negative before the blood can be used for a transfusion. But if a new study is...
As the pandemic continues, some folks remain nervous about visiting the dentist. Yet there are still no documented cases of patients becoming infected through dental care. In the US, less than 1% of dentists have found to be COVID-positive. More, international...
For lots of us, the holidays are a time of amped up stress - although this year, it might be hard to tell the difference between holiday stress and what we’ve all grappled with throughout this wildly challenging year. The American Psychological Association reports...
When it comes to your health and well-being, what you eat matters, as a recent study in PLOS Medicine reminds. The research team set out to answer two basic questions: 1) Can a healthy diet offset the effects of obesity on mortality?, and 2) Can normal weight...
Oxygen. Food. Water. Sleep. These are non-negotiable. Sure, we can exist for a certain amount of time without them, but after a point, you run into trouble. Stop breathing, say, for more than a few minutes, and brain damage starts to occur. Similarly, you need...
By now, you’re probably well aware of the risk factors for complications from COVID-19 - age, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and such. Yet as a recent paper in BDJ notes, such risk factors “do not account for the other 52% of deaths arising from COVID-19 in...
You probably already know vaping isn’t great for you, but you might still think it’s less harmful than smoking. For that, you can thank a whole lot of marketing from the vape companies, much of which is directed at young people. But a new study in Science...
The link between diabetes and gum disease is pretty straightforward: Have one, and you’re more likely to have the other. Both conditions are rampant in the US, with about half of all adults having some degree of gum disease and 34.2 million having diabetes....
At the start of this week, word went out to smokers and vapers that their habits may increase the risk of severe illness from COVID-19 - not that this is at all surprising. COVID-19 is a respiratory disease. Smoking and vaping hurt the lungs and weaken the immune...
You may have heard about the links between gum disease and heart disease, diabetes, even rheumatoid arthritis. Psoriasis? Maybe not. Until now. For a study published last summer, researchers sought to “explore the relationship between psoriasis and a combination...
Prevention is the best medicine, especially when it comes to gum disease, which affects nearly all adults. For it’s not just a matter of keeping your teeth in your mouth - untreated periodontal disease ultimately means tooth loss - but also supporting your whole...
One of the big challenges of gum disease is that it’s easy to overlook symptoms until the disease has progressed quite a bit. There’s typically no pain, and even tell-tale signs such as puffy gums or blood when you brush and floss aren’t apparent in every case....
Vitamin D, we’ve noted before, is crucial for healthy teeth and also plays an important role in strengthening the immune system and warding off depression and fatigue. Both of those are more common in the dark days of winter, of course. Now that summer is just...
Why do we make such a big deal about gum disease and periodontal health? For one, almost everyone is affected by it. According to one study, 93.8% of all adults were found to have some degree of gingivitis, or early stage gum disease that is largely reversible....
Despite studies like one of several we looked at last week, suggesting that exercise may be even better for periodontal (gum) health than improved diet, more research suggests that diet is crucial – possibly even enough to reverse gum disease on its own. It’s a...
Exercise might be the last thing you think of when it comes to ways of taking care of your teeth (well, unless you’re a regular reader and remember this post), but it’s true. Yes, exercise. Physical activity. Walking. Running. Swimming. Working out at the gym....
Some people say vaping is a healthier option than smoking, but is it? A new study in JAMA Network Open aimed to find out. Researchers analyzed urine samples and data on tobacco use from 5105 participants. Some smoked cigarettes. Some vaped. Some did both....