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What happens in your mouth doesn’t stay in your mouth.
Gum inflammation and infections tend to have wider effects in your body beyond only damaging your gum tissues and teeth.
For instance, it’s a medical fact that gum disease is linked to heart disease. And now the latest research links gum infections to memory problems.
How?
Scientists report that inflammation and infection in and around your teeth can damage brain neurons in ways they’ve never before realized. Here’s the story.
A long-term study at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis shows that gum problems, especially serious infections that lead to tooth loss, significantly increase your risk of developing cognitive issues, and even dementia. You probably won’t see the effects on your brain until decades after you first notice the blood on your toothbrush that’s a typical symptom of sick gums.
“We looked at people’s dental health over a 20-year period and found that people with the most severe gum disease at the start of our study had about twice the risk for mild cognitive impairment or dementia by the end,” says researcher Ryan Demmer.
Dr. Demmer’s research analyzed the oral health of more than 8,200 people with healthy memories and an average age of 63 when the research began.
When research began, researchers began testing everyone’s memory and cognitive function as well as giving participants a full dental exam that measured gum health, how much their gums bled and how far their gums had receded. Researchers recorded very detailed results of the dental exams finding:
After 18 years, the researchers found that the people who had severe gum disease and had lost the most teeth had double the risk of MCI (mild cognitive impairment) and Alzheimer’s, as well as another type of dementia, compared to folks who had all their teeth and healthy gums.
Among those who still had some teeth but had what dentists consider severe and intermediate gum disease, the risk for memory problems increased by 20 percent when compared to people with healthy gums.
Another review was performed in South Korea using ten years of health data from 262,349 people over age 49. This study revealed just how gum disease might damage memory.
The researchers suggested that bacteria from infected gums enters the bloodstream, crosses the blood-brain barrier and travels into the brain. The bacteria trigger inflammation of brain tissue and production of many of the toxic proteins (like beta-amyloid) that are the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.
To back up that conclusion, the researchers pointed to another study that revealed the bacterium that drives gum disease, called Porphyromonasgingivalis, is present in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Finally, researchers suggested there’s a third way that gum infection could cause memory loss, by damaging the lining of the blood vessels that lead to the brain. Previous studies suggest that this damage is also linked to an increase in toxic proteins within brain tissue.
Along with damage to your memory, studies also link gum disease to an increased risk of eye damage and blindness. In particular, researchers found age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a significant cause of irreversible vision loss in older people, is linked to periodontal disease.
Recently, lab tests at the Dental College of Georgia, Augusta University, showed that the pathogens causing gum disease can invade retinal cells and cause damage that leads to AMD. The microbes also make epigenetic changes– shifts in the way DNA behaves – to the cells in the eye that render the eyes more vulnerable to being blinded by the disease.
In addition, tests at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine showed how gum disease can damage your cardiovascular system and increase your risk of stroke.
