keep your gums healthy, for a sparkling smile!

Here’s another reason to brush your teeth – poor dental hygiene poses risk of heart attacks and strokes. Heart disease is the No. 1 killer worldwide, claiming upward of 17 million lives every year according to World Health Organization. Smoking, obesity and high cholestrol are the most common culprits, but new research shows that neglected gums can be added to the list.

Experts now recognize that bacterial infections are an independant risk factors for heart diseases. In other words, it doesn’t matter how fit, slim or healthy you are, you’re adding to your chances of getting heart disease by having bad teeth.

There are up to 700 different bacteria in the human mouth, and failing to scrub one’s pearly whites helps those germs to flourish. Most are benign, and some are essential to good health. But a few can trigger a biological cascade leading to diseases of the arteries linked to heart attacks and stroke, according to the new research.

The mouth is probably the dirtiest place in the human body. If you have an open blood vessel from bleeding gums, bacteria will gain entry to your bloodstream. Once inside the blood, certain bacteria stick onto cells called platelets, causing them to clot inside the vessel and thus decreasing blood flow to the heart.

The scientist mimicked the pressure inside blood vessels and in the heart, and demonstrated that bacteria use different mechanisms to cause platelets to clump together, allowing them to completely encase the bacteria. This not only created conditions that can provoke heart attacks and strokes, it also shielded the bacteria from both immune system cells and antibiotics. These findings suggest why antibiotics do not always work in the treatment of infectious heart disease.

In a separate research, a team led by Greg Seymour of the University of Otago, Dunedin in New Zealand, showed how other bacteria from the mouth can provoke atherosclerosis, a disease that causes hardening of the arteries. All organisms including humans and bacteria produce ’stress proteins’, molecules produced by conditions such as inflammation, toxins, starvation, of oxygen deprivation.

One function of stress proteins is to guide other proteins across cell membranes. But they can also latch onto foreign objects, called antigens, and delivers them to immune cells, provoking an immune reaction in the body. Normally, the body does not attack its own stress proteins. But bacterial stress proteins which are similar to human stress proteins do triggers a response and once that has happened, the immune system can no longer differentiate between the two. White blood cells can build up in the tissue of arteries, causing atherosclerosis.

Have you brush yours?