Dental health and mental health
Back in the early 80s, Marshall and Warren made the link between gastric ulcers and Helicobacter pylori infections. Suddenly, a painful chronic condition that increased the risk of stomach cancer was curable with antibiotics.
A major public health scourge today in America is dementia, particularly Alzheimer’s disease. There’s growing evidence that periodontitis is linked to Alzheimer’s disease-related dementia (ADRD). A recent study extended that linkage:
“To date, there are few reports that analyzed features of periodontitis and brain imaging findings associated with impaired cognition and ADRD. In this study, we examined the association of clinical, microbiological, and serological markers of periodontitis with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) markers of atrophy and cerebrovascular disease in a tri-ethnic cohort of individuals over the age of 65 years.”
There is no treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. There are effective treatments for periodontitis. If treating periodontitis reduces the incidence of ADRD significantly, it would be a public health boon on par with antibiotic treatment of gastric ulcers and semaglutides for obesity.
It is an odd feature of health insurance that dental health is seldom if ever covered. Yet oral health has long been linked to cardiovascular health. Now, it appears to be linked to mental health as well. Maybe eventually this one human orifice will be treated like the others.
Periodontitis and Alzheimer’s disease
“Maybe eventually this one human orifice will be treated like the others.”
Over the dead bodies of the Dental Lobby.
There is a robust insurance market for dental services however. I kind of think that up until now, de facto “bundling” probably somehow reduces the profit potential in the dental insurance space.
Correlation is not necessarily causation. In fact, a study of nuns discovered a statistically significant correlation between diagnosed Alzheimer’s and limited cognitive sophistication in their novitiate essays from decades earlier. Perhaps the causation is in the opposite direction; because mental acuity will affect actions taken to avoid future periodontitis.
@Rick,
LOL! Sounds like you didn’t actually read the paper. If you had, you would have seen that the association wasn’t merely between periodontitis and Alzheimer’s, but between *specific bacterial taxa* among the patients with periodontitis. Indeed, some taxa were protective.
If you want to read the paper before commenting (which I recommend), I provided a link to the pdf.