Better Dental Health Means Better General Health

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

Hello, and welcome to the blog! This was sparked off by a number of things: The recent near-crisis in NHS England, caused by a wicked Tory plot to underfund the NHS according to pressure groups and left-leaning English press; the concurrent crisis in NHS Scotland, not the fault of the Scottish National Party according to the loyal Scottish press and Scottish government, but all due to Scottish NHS workers not taking up the offer of flu' vaccines; the equivalent but longer-standing crisis in the private-insurance-funded health care system on Jersey; the fury of some dentists known to the blog author at policies which put colleagues in the invidious position of being "supervisors of neglect" where children's baby-teeth are literally left to rot until an emergency extraction is required, which needs a hospital bed, operating theatre and a (always risky) general anesthetic, when all that would have been needed at a much earlier stage was a lesson in how to use a t