According to a new study, the tooth loss and bleeding gums may have been a sign of the declining of thinking ability of the old. Gary Slade, a professor in Ismile shanghai dental , said that, they wanted to know whether the cognitive of those with poor dental health is relatively poorer. This issue has become hot among a technical term that focus on how well people do with memory and with managing words and numbers.
Slade and his colleagues found that if a person had lost or removed a tooth, then his cognitive function went down. So the cognitive function of those have none of their teeth is poorer than those have teeth, and those with fewer teeth is poorer than those with more. Besides, it is similar when a person has gum disease. To know the connection between dental health and mental health, Shanghai dental launched a research in which included tests of memory and thinking skills, as well as tooth and gum examinations. There are nearly 6000 men and women between the ages of 45 and 64.
Among the participants, there are 13 percent who had no natural teeth. Even if those had teeth, only one-fifth had less than 20 teeth. What is worse, there are more than 12 percent whose dental health is poor, because they had serious bleeding issues and deep gum pockets. According to the research, the fewer teeth, as well as the more serious the bleeding and gum, the worse scores the tests.
The reason of the phenomenon is that poor dental health reflects a poor diet leading to a lack of brain foods, so make the cognitive function decline. In the meanwhile, it may be poor dental health prevent certain foods entering, so lead to cognitive decline. Sometimes, if the inflammation is caused by dental disease, especially gum disease throughout the circulatory system, then cognition may be affected.
However, dental health is not widely thought as a risk factor for cognition issues. According to this study, we can only ensure the connection between the dental health and mental health, not that it is causal. Sometimes, it is possible that systemic inflammation might have an overall effect on both dental health and cognition. In addition, there may be a genetic link between dental health and mental health, and there may be a certain gene that can promote dental health and cognition function.
