A surgeon and dental health expert has warned that a symptom in your mouth could be a key indicator of potential heart trouble. Speaking on the Zoe podcast, Dr Alp Kantarci highlighted the serious implications of poor dental health, which can cause inflammation leading to cardiovascular diseases and heart disease.
Dr Kantarci explained that gum disease and its impact on stomach microbes and the body overall significantly contribute to inflammation, putting the body under immense pressure. He detailed how heart attacks and strokes occur, stating: "Most of the cardiovascular diseases or cardiac diseases are the results of your blood vessels, mainly aorta becoming clogged, and the aorta is the major vessel coming out from your heart and distributing all the blood to that. That's where you get the cardiac arrest.
"The aorta is like a hose and it comes all the way from your heart and goes into the rest of your body. So that hose is now being blocked by the lipids, by the fat layers internally, that cannot really pass through. That's where you're going to get a heart attack because if one of these blockage reaches to your heart and then it actually causes your heart not to function, then you're going to heart attack."
He explained that the body accumulating these fat deposits, or lipids, means that if they dislodge from the aorta and strike another organ, they can trigger a stroke. A thrombus is a healthy response to injury intended to halt and prevent further bleeding, but Dr Kantarci warned it can "go anywhere, it can clog any part of your body. It can basically cause you to get paralysed and so forth."
He also highlighted the significant impact oral health can have. "So this is a process that can be completely aggravated and worsened by gum disease through two mechanisms," he said.
"So you treat two things. Number one, you reduce the bacterial load by treating gum disease. But the second one is that you're also reducing your inflammatory burden on your body by treating gum disease."
Previously, Dr Kantarci mentioned that the inflammatory issues caused by gum disease also exacerbate conditions such as diabetes. He stated: "So your inflammatory burden is one of the reasons why your diabetes gets worse.
"Your blood sugar goes up, your haemoglobin A1C levels go up and your response to diabetic treatments or diabetic drugs and so on and so forth will be completely impaired. This is the humbling moment that the dentist becomes a part of the medical team because we're not treating diabetes.
"We treat our own diseases. We treat our teeth, we treat our gums, we treat our oral cavity, but we can help our medical colleagues treat their patients better if the patients are treated by us too."
Zoe podcast CEO, Jonathan Wolf, chimed in to say: "Well, I think everybody is going to be listening to this and thinking, I think I need to look after my teeth better than perhaps I thought 24 hours ago."