Better Dental Health Means Better General Health

This is a link to an article by Mario D. Garret PhD on the "Psychology Today" website, describing various pieces of research on links between dental infections and dementia. It's worth a read. There seems to be more of a connection to Alzheimer's Disease than Vascular Dementia, so far, but the blog author intends to go on looking, as anything that involves inflammation in the neck might contribute to vascular dementia. While hunting for articles on this subject, the blog author came across quite a lot of material indicating that people who already have dementia, suffer worse problems (especially memory loss) if they then get an infection of almost any sort. The main suspects are chest infections and UTIs, but references are also made to common colds and, well, practically everything. It seems likely that dental infections are equally damaging once a patient actually has dementia, but this does not address the question of whether or not dental infections can act

The introductory article to this blog solicits articles from dental and medical practitioners about studies showing links between dental health (good and bad) and common serious diseases such as heart disease, strokes, dementia and diabetes. This article is to make clear that academic researchers, those conducting such studies or those who are simply interested in the results, are also welcome to submit articles (two different ways of doing this, for your convenience, see link to introductory article). The blog author would also welcome input from others: such as statistics students who've looked at one or more such studies to see whether the results really support the claims, and from politics/civics students on the odds of the blog and the intended Parliamentary Petition actually securing the kind of shift in priorities towards better dental health as a form of general preventative health care.

(This article is largely an exercise in commonsense and did not need a medical expert to get it written.)  This is a link to an article by Eli Wolfe on the California Magazine website, about a study into the relationship between sleep and Alzheimer's Disease conducted by Prof. Bryce Mander (neuroscientist) of U.C. Berkeley and his co-leader, Prof. William Jagust (an expert on Alzheimer’s.) The article also contains (positive) comments by Prof. Douglas Galasko of U.C. San Diego, who was not involved in the study itself. It is well worth a read, both in the limited context of this article and because it also gives ordinary readers of this blog a start on understanding what the mechanism behind Alzheimer's is, which will be helpful once we get onto discussing different, more direct ways in which dental infections etc. may trigger or aggravate dementia. (There are other types of dementia with different mechanisms; vascular dementia for example.) Basically, the study