Time to teach public "must get dental checkup every 6 months"

Mouth is the portal of body. Without healthy mouth it is impossible to have good general health and self esteem. This fact is to be made known to public. It is high time that a systematic campaign is taken up to drive this point home. People do a servicing for their car and two wheeler, they have to be educated that 6 monthly dental checkup is a must. Here are two more news items, one of them is from Harvard.

For many, good oral care—not antibiotics—best bet in preventing dental-related heart problems, reports the Harvard Heart Letter

Since the 1950s, the American Heart Association (AHA) has urged a sizable group of people to take antibiotics before having dental work or other procedures that might flood the bloodstream with bacteria. The antibiotics were supposed to prevent infective endocarditis, a potentially serious infection of the heart’s lining. After a look at the latest evidence, the AHA now emphasizes routine oral care and recommends pre-procedure antibiotics for only some people, reports the October 2007 issue of the Harvard Heart Letter. If good oral health is maintained heart is always healthy and it is better than taking antibiotics. Full report here

Study Finds Possible Link Between Tooth Loss, Dementia, Tooth loss= Memory loss

Tooth loss may predict the development of dementia late in life, according to a study by University of Kentucky researchers.

The researcher, led by Pamela Sparks Stein in the UK College of Medicine's Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, used data collected from 144 participants in the Nun Study, a study of aging and Alzheimer's disease among Catholic sisters of the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

"Of the participants who did not have dementia at the first examination (of annual exams over a 12-year period), those with few teeth zero to nine had an increased risk of developing dementia during the study, compared with those who had 10 or more teeth," the researchers reported in a paper published in the October issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA). The researchers relied on dental records and annual cognitive exams of the Nun Study participants in the order's Milwaukee province. The participants' ages ranged from 75 to 98 years old. More here