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Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated
- ProAm 2y agoFrom cavities no, but from tooth pain yes. There are so many stories of suicide because the tooth pain was so bad they could not wait and endure it.
- AStonesThrow 2y agoPrepositions are crazy sometimes, right?
- yosito 2y agoIt seems you misread the headline and didn't read the article.
- AStonesThrow 2y agoI'm unable to distinguish between this narrative and the premise of "Jurassic Park"
- ChaitanyaSai 2y agoDown to the island!
- bobthepanda 2y agoI Am Legend is probably closer.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoNature um finds a way
- m463 2y agoThe summary at the end is pretty overt, but I like it.
- comp_throw7 2y ago> in fact, it forms less than 2% of all the bacteria that cause caries I tracked down the chain of citations here. The directly cited article (https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2018.81 https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2018.81) says the following: "These caries ecological concepts have been confirmed by recent DNA- and RNA-based molecular studies that have uncovered an extraordinarily diverse microbial ecosystem, where S. mutans accounts for a very small fraction (0.1%–1.6%) of the bacterial community implicated in the caries process.[20]" Note the sudden conversion of "implicated in the caries process" to "cause caries". The next step in the citation chain is https://www.cell.com/trends/microbiology/abstract/S0966-842X(14)00225-X https://www.cell.com/trends/microbiology/abstract/S0966-842X.... "In recent years, the use of second-generation sequencing and metagenomic techniques has uncovered an extraordinarily diverse ecosystem where S. mutans accounts only for 0.1% of the bacterial community in dental plaque and 0.7–1.6% in carious lesions[14,15]." Now the claim is merely one of prevalence! The next steps in the citation chain, https://karger.com/cre/article-abstract/47/6/591/85901/A-Tissue-Dependent-Hypothesis-of-Dental-Caries https://karger.com/cre/article-abstract/47/6/591/85901/A-Tis... and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0047722 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..., do seem to plausibly provide evidence that there are other mouth-colonizing bacteria which would perform the same function as S. Mutans when it comes to causing caries, such that fully eliminating S. Mutans probably wouldn't eliminate caries entirely. But, importantly, the citation in the McGill article doesn't much support the original claim, and this citation chain could easily have bottomed out in a completely different set of results which didn't happen to lend some (weak) evidentiary support to the high-level claim. Also importantly, this article is committing the sin of figuring out some reasons why a treatment might not be perfectly effective in all cases, and implicitly deciding that justifies ignoring any non-total benefits (i.e. cases where S. Mutans would have been counterfactually responsible for causing caries, that could be prevented). Questions that would have been appropriate, but were apparently uninteresting: "Does this intervention also happen to chase out other acid-producing bacteria that fulfill a similar ecological niche as S. Mutans?" "What percentage of caries cases would be prevented by chasing out just S. Mutans with this intervention, while leaving other acid-producing bacteria untouched?" Likely this is because answers to those questions would not really have changed the bottom line. That bottom line was written by the "unanswered" safety concerns (reasonable in the abstract, less obviously reasonable in this specific case). All of the listed safety concerns have evidence pointing in various directions. Very little of that evidence is listed, probably because it's not in a format that's legible to scientific institutions. The article does note, earlier on, "The toxicity of this Mutacin-1140 compound had not been tested. What would be the consequences of millions of bacteria in the mouth releasing this compound? The answer wasn’t clear, even though the archetypal compound in the family Mutacin-1140 belonged to was known to be very safe." This is obviously relevant evidence about the safety of Mutacin-1140. _How much_ evidence? Unasked, unanswered. (I have no idea how predictive the safety of other compounds in the same family is of another unstudied compound in that family, I'm not a biologist. But this is not an _unanswerable_ question.) (Marginal conflict of interest: I know the Lumina founder socially. I have no financial interest in that venture or any of his other ventures. I have not taken Lumina myself.)
- yosito 2y agoI have a feeling that the people who would trust a product like Lumina are probably the same people who will never use flouride.
- chrisfosterelli 2y agoI'm strongly considering it, although I can't get it where I live yet. I've never had a cavity, but I spend a lot of time doing endurance sports and very high carbohydrate intake has become the latest performance enhancer. As a result I'm often drinking a couple hundred grams of plain table sugar per week and I'd like to keep my streak of good teeth health. If I can do that for $250 I don't see why not. They're pretty clear it's not a replacement for brushing. I think of it as preventative care (assuming it is actually safe of course).
- Grimblewald 2y agoRead the article. If you have not already, you might rethink consideration of this product.
- dgfitz 2y agoThey just needed to humble brag, the article wasn’t important.
- BytesAndGears 2y agoI don’t think that’s the case at all - it’s a common concern in endurance sports, you really do have huge quantities of sugar.
- comp_throw7 2y agoThe article provides some reasons to think that the treatment might not be fully effective even conditional on the mechanism of action working as described, not that it won't do anything at all.
- thowawatp302 2y ago> in fact, it forms less than 2% of all the bacteria that cause caries The word “cause” seemed to be doing a lot of lifting
- vigneshwaraya 2y agoOr, just use oil pulling with coconut oil. simple, natural and easiest way to reverse and prevent cavities. keeping the oil in the mouth for 20 minutes (before spitting out into the sink) is also a great way to maintain silence, and develop awareness of oral process, as you can't swallow. More generally, am highly skeptical of this whole genetic modification drive for replacement of undesirable creatures like mosquitos and screw worms and now bacteria. Sure, sounds like a great idea and may work for the advertised benefits, but look who's funding it and how keen they are on developing vectors to human blood and what other tampering may occur that would be undetectable to anyone without millions of dollars of sequencing equipment. It fits in with the biosynthetic technology drive towards transhumanism alongside nanotechnology, worth researching before jumping on the "Homo Deus" bandwagon that paints us as 'hackable animals' whose soul is due to be extinct (quoting the top transhuman posterchild N. Harari). Worth deeply investigating the other side of the story, most clearly outlined by Prof. Anita Baxas, but also see Dr. Edward Group, Dr Ana Mihalchea, Karen Kingston and Dr. David Nixon.
- CyberDildonics 2y agoIf this is your very first comment, I can't wait for your next one.
- j_bum 2y agoWhat’s your evidence or rationale for the oil routine? Serious question, not trolling
- hackernewds 2y agoThousands of years of test of time stood with ayurveda. also validated with citations as experiments catch up https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5654187/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5654187/
- j_bum 2y agoThanks for sharing the article, will give it a read.
- bawolff 2y agoWhat i don't understand, is why not do animal studies? Like sure that won't answer all questions, but it seems like it would shed some light on if other bacteria cause cavities or not, and if nothing else a basic starting point.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- derektank 2y agoIt mentions this in the article but JD Hillman's team did study the s. mutans bacteria in rats. The results of that research were that the rats dosed with BCS3-L1 did experience fewer dental carries.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoHard to ethically replicate the conditions of the typical american mouth on an animal model.
- mishu2 2y agoIt may still take us some time to reach that goal, but the good news is that we have an effective solution available right now: keeping good oral hygiene is known to prevent both caries and gum disease, and takes less than 10 minutes a day for the average person. If you need more information, we recently developed a free website to get you started: https://lifelongsmiles.hk/ https://lifelongsmiles.hk/
- csallen 2y agoYour heart's in the right place, but these videos are hard to watch.
- nothrabannosir 2y agoWhich one? I was looking forward to some awkwardness but all I can find are tutorials on teeth hygiene.
- ttrmw 2y agoDunno that it's awkwardness so much as the discomfort of watching someone with pretty messed up teeth forcing too-large ID brushes in between them
- csallen 2y agoThis exactly. I don't think the average person is as comfortable as a medical professional at starting at videos/images of messed up teeth, injuries, disease, etc. It's not exactly what we want to stare at when learning.
- csallen 2y agoAlso, while I'm at it, I'd suggest maybe putting an hour or two of research into how to make content… exciting? I know you're a dentist and a software engineer, not a YouTuber, but it's worth looking up a bit about what YouTubers and entertainers know about how to hold an audience's attention. Just a few small changes can probably result in a 1.5-3x improvement in the number of people who make it to the end of a video.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoWild, I first read about this twenty+ years ago, maybe thirty. Oragenics rang a bell, near some university in Florida? Also, the New York Times magazine had a piece on the Prospera island in Central America last weekend, was interesting as well. Supposed to have fewer regulations but the previous government is trying to reclaim it. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-honduras-crypto.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-hondura...
- gcanyon 2y agoSame -- I would have guessed that I read about this in the late '80s.
- xvector 2y agoWow, the FDA is worse than useless. So much regulatory red tape. These guys had every single reasonable safeguard in place and the FDA kept putting requirement on top of requirement until literally no one would qualify for the study. 20-30 years later and humanity has had precisely zero benefit because of the FDA's simply absurd, technically impossible level of overcaution in this scenario. It is incredible how much medical innovation is being held back because of these sort of politics. I hope the people that constantly cheer on more regulation or the FDA itself take a look at cases like this and hundreds of other similar cases where companies have simply given up on safe, promising approaches due to the regulatory red tape.
- maushu 2y agoSometimes red tape is good in situations that might affect a large part of the population. Remember the whole Thalidomide situation.
- xvector 2y agoWhen red tape makes drug development and testing impossible, as it did here, the system has ceased to benefit humanity and is causing nothing but stagnation and long-term suffering (by virtue of holding back potentially life-improving or life-saving treatments.) Enabling medical progress is far more important in the long term for our species (and to reduce suffering) than adding the umpteenth killswitch/safeguard for an ostensibly safe medicine. But FDA regulators have no incentive in the positive direction, only in the negative direction. The more drugs they deny, the less likely they can be blamed if something goes wrong; the more requirements they add, the more secure their careers - humanity's medical progress be damned.
- wxnx 2y agoIt is unfortunate that the only way to get through the regulatory process is copious $ - but it does work. If this project were better funded, it would likely have gotten through. There is an entire political party representing something like half the population of the US dedicated to shrinking the regulatory apparatus, including the FDA. That doesn't sound like career security to me.
- derektank 2y agoIt seems like FDA restrictions on clinical trials have really shot us all in the foot by depriving us the opportunity to collect data on this bacteria before it was made available as a supplement. There is clearly a demand for this product and it seems quite likely that Hillman et al could have gotten a cohort together to conduct a trial if they hadn't been faced with such extreme restrictions on testing. Why is informed consent not sufficient for participation in a RCT?
- zenexer 2y agoBecause the participants could very easily spread it to other people. This wouldn’t just affect them. That’s why the trial was ultimately required to take place under quarantine. It’s not even a question of whether it would spread, but whether it might spread. There’s a reasonable chance that this bacterium would, in fact, spread, and nobody has proven otherwise. The FDA is doing its job here: it’s protecting the masses from people who believe they’re just consenting for themselves.
- bcoates 2y agoDoes the FDA have any actual mandate or expertise to do that, or are they just embracing mission creep?
- connicpu 2y agoI think their right to regulate this is similar to their right to tell labs working with smallpox that they have to run a tight ship to prevent leaks.
- mapt 2y agoThe FDA, however, is not regulating the spread of the 800 other known species of oral bacteria as well as presumably numerous unknown ones, which do cause some known harm. The extreme suspicion of commercially introduced anthropogenic agents seems a bit ridiculous in both natural ecology and the human microbiome. Prove this compound conclusively safe, but not these other ten million compounds we're just going to allow to run wild. Or for competitors - rely on the 'proof' of safety established in the 1920's or the 1970's before we had any idea whatsoever what we were doing scientifically. Or just rely on doctors/dentists unsupported first-principles advice - we've never demonstrated scientifically that floss works, for example. We should all be quarantined, all the time, by this criteria. Regulatory bodies have a great cognitive bias towards fictional 'purity' of systems that are in actual scientific fact, messy and routinely contaminated in various ways.
- cubefox 2y ago> We are thus left with a product, Lumina, that cannot guarantee the prevention of future caries "Guarantees" are not strictly needed. What matters most is whether there is a substantial reduction of future caries, not whether it makes you totally immune to it. Say, if Lumina/BCS3-L1 "only" reduces cavities by 50%, it is already half as good (arguably) as a drug which prevented 100%. This would already be large progress for such a massive global problem. The article author does not seem to recognize the potential of such a drug.
- johnyzee 2y agoThe tone of the article is for some reason very dismissive and derisive of alternatives to plain dental hygiene. As you point out, if a simple supplement in the form of harmless bacteria could improve caries reduction by even a small amount, it seems it would be a valuable option. There is an existing 'probiotic' that has been around for years and works the same way, and promises the same benefits, as the one described in the article, it is called Streptococcus salivarius M18, there are quite a few studies that indicate it does work to some extent [1]. You get them in the form of lozenges that you put in the mouth while sleeping and they dissolve by themselves, so not a very invasive treatment if one wanted to use it. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Streptococcus+salivarius+M18 https://www.google.com/search?q=Streptococcus+salivarius+M18
- cubefox 2y ago> The tone of the article is for some reason very dismissive and derisive of alternatives to plain dental hygiene. Yeah, emphasis on "plain". It's proposed as an addition, not an alternative, to conventonal tooth brushing. Streptococcus salivarius M18 seems also interesting, but its results in preventing caries are much more limited, from what I can tell. It also has be taken continuously (once per day), instead being a one-time application like BCS3-L1.
- pj808 2y agoThe claim of the headline is also not supported by the evidence shared in the article. As just one example, the article notes that many different strains of bacteria are responsible for caries. This fact doesn't necessarily say anything about the effectiveness of Lantern's treatments - although it might shed light on the mechanisms that make it effe tive (or not). That's what the clinical trials and studies on the early adopters are for. There's lots of interesting commentary on the early research, such as Scott Alexander's write-up, that are much better than this article.
- ck2 2y agoAnecdotal of course but because of my long-covid I have been taking a ton of Vitamin K2 over the past few years. And all my teeth aches are gone, one less problem to worry about. This matches reports by others that K2 seems to pull calcium out of your saliva and into your gums/teeth where it should be and makes them stronger. Maybe. It does seem to keep teeth more "squeaky clean". https://google.com/search?q=vitamin-k2+squeaky+clean+teeth https://google.com/search?q=vitamin-k2+squeaky+clean+teeth
- gwern 2y agoOP reads like a lazy ripoff of earlier debates around Lumina, principally https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/please-dont-take-luminas-anticavity https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/please-dont-take-luminas-a... , which I don't see acknowledged or linked at all.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoTo be fair I be fair I’ve seen many articles and source materials on the debate and most of it is based on an understanding of the current state of the science, which is available from primary sources and not just random substacks and blogs. I would feel totally comfortable writing one of these articles on Lumina myself without citing anything but primary research, which this article does do, and not citing anyone of the secondary sources of opinion I might have read along the way.
- lazycog512 2y agocui bono? how are you going to make any progress if you block research and experimentation consistently into areas that conveniently line the pockets of the state-protected dental guild?