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A new study performed by the Columbia University in New York, USA has come up with some startling results: apparently, gum health and heart disease are related, and if you take care of your gums, then you can reduce the risk of developing a heart disease. The reasoning behind this find is that if one improves dental care, the speed with which plaque builds up in the arteries slows down.
Gum Health and Heart Disease
One way to take the best care of your teeth is to follow your dentist’s recommendations and brush after each meal, maybe using the new Oral B smart toothbrush, floss and use mouthwash and then you can rest assured that you’ve decreased your risk of developing a heart disease.
The study that linked gum health and heart disease appeared in the Journal of the American Heart Association shows that improving gum health is linked to a substantially slower advance of atherosclerosis (a disease which manifests itself through plaque buildup in the arteries). The disease increases a person’s risk of developing stroke and heart disease.
The main author of the study, associate professor of Epidemiology Moïse Desvarieux, at Columbia’s Mailman School of Health, believes that these results are extremely important because atherosclerosis proceeded at the same time with clinical periodontal disease and the bacterial profiles in the gums. These findings that link gum health and heart disease are the most direct evidence that if you modify the periodontal bacterial profile, then you can prevent or slow down heart disease.
The study was performed on around 400 adults with ages between 60 and 75 from New York. They all got tested for oral infection and the thickness of arteries at the beginning of the study and three years later, when the research ended. Over 5,000 samples of plaque were retrieved and analyzed and the results showed that people with improved gum health had a slower advance of atherosclerosis.
What are your thoughts on this? Are you going to start brushing more often? Leave us your thoughts below!
