About: admin

Clinical trials continue. Data presented to oral medicine conference Cleaning your mouth and cleaning your arteries could be as simple as a once-a-day oral rinse if additional studies confirm preliminary findings about a new product. Biomedical Development Corporation (BDC) on April 23 will present data to the American Academy of Oral Medicine showing that its oral rinse was safe and effective at fighting gingivitis in a recent clinical trial. But the most surprising finding of the study was that users of the oral rinse showed lower LDL cholesterol levels than the placebo group. "We didn't expect to see any difference in LDL cholesterol," said Dr. Charles Gauntt, the study's principal investigator. "We expected to see improvements in oral health, and we did. But we also monitored a number of biological markers for inflammation. The results showed the oral rinse had no adverse effects and users exhibited lower levels of LDL, or what many...

Researchers from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine have discovered a statistical association between the injection of local dental anesthesia given to children ages two to six and evidence of missing lower wisdom teeth. The results of this epidemiological study, published in the April issue of The Journal of the American Dental Association, suggest that injecting anesthesia into the gums of young children may interrupt the development of the lower wisdom tooth. "It is intriguing to think that something as routine as local anesthesia could stop wisdom teeth from developing. This is the first study in humans showing an association between a routinely- administered, minimally-invasive clinical procedure and arrested third molar growth," said corresponding author, Anthony R. Silvestri, D.M.D., clinical professor in the department of prosthodontics and operative dentistry at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine. Wisdom teeth are potentially vulnerable to injury because their development - unlike all other teeth -...

Microbes from the human mouth are telling Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists something about periodontitis and more after they cracked the genetic code of bacteria linked to the condition. The finding, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, profiles the SR1 bacteria, a group of microbes present in many environments, ranging from the mouth to deep within the Earth, that have never been cultivated in the laboratory. Human oral SR1 bacteria are elevated in periodontitis, a disease marked by inflammation and infection of the ligaments and bones that support the teeth. Scientists also found that the SR1 bacteria employ a unique genetic code in which the codon UGA - a sequence of nucleotides guiding protein synthesis -- appears not to serve its normal role as a stop code. In fact, scientists found that UGA serves to introduce a glycine amino acid instead. "This is like discovering that in a language you...