6 ms·

Oral Microbes Linked to 3-Fold Increased Risk of Pancreatic Cancer

150 points by bmau5 1y ago

johnea 1y ago
To me the title of this article, and several points contained within, where overly broad. They give the impression that _having_ microbes in your mouth and on your skin is a cancer risk, which is most definitely not the case. The connection between the microbiome and cancer and heart disease is coming more to light. And the articles point that certain microbes may contribute to cancer risk sounds like another significant new finding. But having a sterile environment in the mouth or on the skin is certainly detrimental to health. Like the gut microbiome, it's the content that counts, not whether to have one or not...
- ortusdux 1y ago
  The wording seems causational, while the data indicates a correlation. "Altogether, the entire group of microbes boosted participants’ chances of developing the cancer by more than threefold." I feel like you would need a study that observes the effect of introducing or remove these microbes from a population before you can draw this conclusion.
- blindriver 1y ago
  > But having a sterile environment in the mouth or on the skin is certainly detrimental to health. Can you point to a study that suggests this? I have no opinion one way or another but making statements like this without any backing is misinformation.
  - dham 1y ago
    Just like the gut you have to have the right bacteria. Not none. This is a study on Psoriasis which is caused by systematic inflamation. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9076720/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9076720/
  - ebolyen 1y ago
    It is the initial purpose of a microbiome to be at least commensal, in that it is usually prohibitively expensive to maintain a sterile environment so the odds of a true pathogen colonizing a system is greatly reduced if you simply have a crowded space of neutral participants. Once that's true it does seem there's a lot of host and microbiome interactions we've only begun to explore, but it shouldn't be surprising that co-evolution of the microbiome and host begins to take over as soon as you have one. One great example is short-chain-fatty-acid (SCFA) producing bacteria in the human gut. [1] These seem to be essential, and if there was a general takeaway to improve health, it would be to eat your roughage so they can do their job. This is also why high alpha-diversity (community richness in particular) is such a dead-ringer for healthy vs diseased states. And frustratingly, is often exactly where the story ends for a lot of observational studies. Also, in case you are curious, artificially sterile mice (gnotobiotic mice) tend to act differently than other mice, which is pretty odd to be honest, and why the gut-brain axis is a plausible mechanism to research further. [2] [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180739/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180739/ [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889159125003198 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915912...
  - iammrpayments 1y ago
    Cavities are caused by corrosion from acid produced by a bacteria called streptococus mutans, they digest the sugar in your mouth and produce acid, they thrive in slightly acidic environments. If you have other types of bacteria in your mouth, they will leave less sugar to be digested and will also produce byproducts that make leave your mouth ph less acidic.
  - johnea 1y ago
    This one only discusses the benefits of the microbiome in broad terms, but it has a bunch of interesting introductory info: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6503789/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6503789/ tl;dr > The oral microbiome usually exists in the form of a biofilm. It plays a crucial role in maintaining oral homeostasis, protecting the oral cavity, and preventing disease development. That NIH article also refers to some fields that are experiencing wide recent advances: the gut/brain axis, and communication from the skin microbiota that stimulates the first immune responses to pathogenic organisms. This link describes some aspects of the skin microbiome: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250402/How-your-skine28099s-microbes-shape-immunity-inflammation-and-chronic-skin-disease.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250402/How-your-skine280... I up-voted your post. I don't think there should be a penalty for asking for a reference. Although, I'm not always in the mood to dig up _good_ links on subjects that I've read enough to form an opinion.
panabee 1y ago
The association between pathogens and cancer is under-appreciated, mostly due to limitations in detection methods. For instance, it is not uncommon for cancer studies to design assays around non-oncogenic strains, or for assays to use primer sequences with binding sites mismatched to a large number of NCBI GenBank genomes. Another example: studies relying on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which is a rich database for cancer investigations. However, the TCGA made a deliberate tradeoff to standardize quantification of eukaryotic coding transcripts but at the cost of excluding non-poly(A) transcripts like EBER1/2 and other viral non-coding RNAs -- thus potentially understating viral presence. Enjoy the rabbit hole. :)
- edem 1y ago
  can you translate this to English?
pessimizer 1y ago
The real question always is: assuming causation, if you drastically improve the oral health of 1000 people, how many would you save from pancreatic cancer? The answer to this question in associative studies is very often in the single figures, or lower (i.e. fractions of people.) Anything to create an excuse to provide better dental care for people, though. The chance of getting a gum infection that spreads to your brain and/or goes septic is actually quite high.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Dental health is also correlated with a number of other illnesses and there is some literature suggesting different pathogens as a cause. Instead of looking at just one illness/death prevented it may be a much higher number if all forms are considered.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    I don't know why this is always controversial in modern society, but it's always important to do the math, rather than immediately go all in on whatever supports your current lifestyle or the lifestyles of the people that you admire or fetishize. There are plenty of good reasons to give people medical care. Clean mouths may be beneficial in many other ways other than allowing me to be within 5' of you when your mouth is open. Militant advocacy for innumeracy is a worse disease than pancreatic cancer, though. I once had a gum infection so bad that the uncontrollable diarrhea it gave me had me so dehydrated, I was afraid I was going to pass out and die alone in my apartment (as has happened to many, many people.) I went to the emergency room and I had to beg them to pay attention to me at all. They recommended a dentist appointment. I could barely stand. Finally, one that wasn't mentally disabled recognized my distress and gave me an IV. Do you think this would change if I said that it might triple my risk of pancreatic cancer from nearly nothing to nearly nothing? No. This study is something to add a completely spurious and inconsequential fact to toothpaste commercials, that's it. It reaches no conclusion that could help anyone with anything. If they intend to isolate the particular microbes that are more associated, and if those have an association with something that may also have an association with pancreatic cancer; or anything other than the p-hacking that this sounds like, it would be a different story.
layer8 1y ago
1) I find numbers like “3-fold increased risk” a bit meaningless without knowing the baseline risk. 2) Here is an audio interview with one of the authors of the study: https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/audio-player/19004027 https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/audio-player/19004027
- glenstein 1y ago
  >1) I find numbers like “3-fold increased risk” a bit meaningless without knowing the baseline risk. Yeah, I don't see this talked about enough. If it's three fold from 33% baseline to 99%, thats a big deal. If it's a three fold increase from 0.000000033% to 0.000000099%, even the new number is minuscule. It's why, say, blue M&M's increasing risk of cancer by 75% isn't necessarily as big a problem as it sounds.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- lisbbb 1y ago
  My father-in-law who died of pancreatic cancer in 2016 had excellent oral health. In fact, he never had a single cavity in his entire 76 years of life.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    And there are chain smokers without lung issues. Anecdata really doesn't provide us much information.
- Fomite 1y ago
  This is, among other things, a quirk of both statistics (models with relative effect measures are better behaved/easier than ones with absolute measures outside toy examples) and early causal inference where we underestimated just how bad smoking is for you. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20010205/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20010205/
dham 1y ago
I've been saying what we actually need is universal dental care vs universal health care for over 15 years. Giving out universal health care without dental care is like changing the oil in a car but failing to see the tires aren't even on. I heard horror stories from my mom who worked in a periodontist office (as receptionist) growing up. Really got me to care about oral health early on. Health really starts at the mouth. If you don't have a healthy mouth you'll never have a healthy body.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  I find it completely strange that dental care isn't just considered part of standard healthcare. Like, so my employer's health care plan covers every part of my body except my mouth? Why does my mouth specifically need its own plan?
  - wormius 1y ago
    Here's an article about the history of that: https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/reason-your-dental-work-isn-t-covered-medical-insurance-ncna813666 https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/reason-your-dental-wor...
  - atombender 1y ago
    It's a really unfortunate historical accident, especially in the US. Dentistry evolved relatively late compared to regular medicine, and early oral procedures were mostly tooth extractions, which ended up being predominantly done by barbers, who would also do surgery (!). These procedures were often considered crude and beneath that of a trained doctor, and they were generally performed by self-trained practitioners. There were several attempts in the 1800s to integrate dentistry into mainstream medicine, but they failed, both because the doctors of the time didn't think of dentistry as being a real science, but also because, as dentistry started to legitimize itself, the dentists themselves preferred being separate. For some reason the same separation also evolved in the U.K., but it's more integrated in other countries. For example, basic dental coverage is part of national healthcare in Germany and Japan. In the U.S., dentists have their own schools and licensing boards and so on, which isn't the case in the rest of the world, where dentistry is usually accepted as a regular branch of medicine and taught at the same universities.
donperignon 1y ago
Or maybe a compromised inmune system is what allow candida to flourish…
- djmips 1y ago
  Perhaps an issue like diabetes in which the high blood sugar provides an inviting environment for candida and also weakens the immune system.
anonzzzies 1y ago
I am sure many more will be linked to our mouths and we will regret that countries with good free public healthcare don't include dental. People just cannot afford to go until it hurts which often means it is very bad already.
edem 1y ago
so what was the baseline risk that was increased 3-fold?
- ekianjo 1y ago
  You know the numbers are bullshit when they never tell you: - the baseline risk - the increased risk In the same article. And yet HN commenters are easily manipulated into thinking that suddenky oral health is a big driver of pancreatic cancer.
  - add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    > And yet HN commenters are easily manipulated into thinking that suddenky oral health is a big driver of pancreatic cancer. This isn't happening, this is you starting from a solipsist axiom that you're smarter than everyone else, who comparatively must be automatons about receiving information.
Earw0rm 1y ago
It's unsurprising that certain strains would lead to increased cancer risk. We've known about this with bacteria (H. Pylori and stomach cancer), viruses (HPV and genital cancers) and fungi (carcinogenic liver toxins) for a long time. But I do somewhat wonder about the dental profession's "nuke it all" approach to the oral microbiome. We've largely moved away from that for other outside-facing body parts - it's recognised that for organs like skin, gut, vagina, scalp etc that there is such a thing as a healthy, balanced microbiome. I expect they'll get around to discovering the same for the mouth at some point - that if you have the right bacteria and don't overfeed them with massive amounts of glucose and fructose, that's broadly a healthier mouth than blasting everything to oblivion at every opportunity.
- zemvpferreira 1y ago
  This has not been my experience with dentistry. If anything they advise against alcohol-based mouthwashes etc.
- cinntaile 1y ago
  Do you mean that brushing your teeth with toothpaste blasts everything to oblivion? I have a hard time believing that.
  - whatevaa 1y ago
    Probably meant antibacterial mouth washes.
    - cinntaile 1y ago
      I see, but that hasn't been standard care for at least a decade as far as I know?
semessier 1y ago
which begs the question that which daily mouthwash is a) broadband effective against many including the right pathogens c) long-time, safe/tolerable for long time daily use. Candidate being Chlorhexidine 0.06% - are there opinions on it?
- mrtesthah 1y ago
  Mouthwash is probably bad for you: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7125030/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7125030/
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    It has always seemed suspect to me. Nuking the microbiome in your mouth seems equivalent to taking a daily broad spectrum antibiotic. It's gonna kill everything, good, bad, or indifferent.
TaupeRanger 1y ago
People are talking about dental hygiene in this thread, but it’s only mentioned once in the article, and only to suggest that a small portion of the microbes associated with cancer were also associated with dental disease. We literally don’t know if using mouthwash or brushing for 30 seconds longer (the main differences in dental hygiene habits among people reading this) has any effect on cancer risk, so what’s the point of even posting this?
- chaostheory 1y ago
  Because keeping your mouth clean is both cheap and easy. If there’s a minuscule chance that it will reduce any risk in cancer, why not? Besides, who wants bad breath?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - TaupeRanger 1y ago
    Because we don’t know either way. There’s also a minuscule chance that doing extra cleaning might lead to the opposite effect, as evidenced by another reply here. We don’t know. This article mentions nothing about halitosis.
    - chaostheory 1y ago
      Yes, but it’s so cheap and easy to do both time-wise and cost wise that it’s a completely moot point.
- lq9AJ8yrfs 1y ago
  What if we helped everybody look better and smell better and it turned out it was all for nothing?
  - TaupeRanger 1y ago
    If “for nothing” includes an increase in disease from eradicating an otherwise healthy oral microbiome by over-cleaning/washing, well I don’t think I need to answer that. Since we don’t know either way, best avoid drawing a conclusion.
MillironX 1y ago
> scientists have uncovered a mechanism that could help explain this connection, finding that bacteria can travel through swallowed saliva into the pancreas Except, this study didn't do that. It did shotgun sequencing and found a correlation between certain microbial species (some were fungal, not bacterial) and cancer risk. It *did not* demonstrate anything about mechanism. Based on the way it's phrased, maybe this article is saying that previous studies have found a mechanism, and this study found the microbial culprits. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the full study to see if that's the case in its introduction or discussion. Even so, that's an incredibly misleading opening to the article.
mannanj 1y ago
People forget Breathing through the mouth is a recipe for poor oral microbes. This became mainstream when we gained softer foods and transitioned living to indoor places with high indoor air pollution. Normalize nose breathing again.

150 points by bmau5 1y ago

To me the title of this article, and several points contained within, where overly broad. They give the impression that _having_ microbes in your mouth and on your skin is a cancer risk, which is most definitely not the case. The connection between the microbiome and cancer and heart disease is coming more to light. And the articles point that certain microbes may contribute to cancer risk sounds like another significant new finding. But having a sterile environment in the mouth or on the skin is certainly detrimental to health. Like the gut microbiome, it's the content that counts, not whether to have one or not...

ortusdux 1y ago
The wording seems causational, while the data indicates a correlation. "Altogether, the entire group of microbes boosted participants’ chances of developing the cancer by more than threefold." I feel like you would need a study that observes the effect of introducing or remove these microbes from a population before you can draw this conclusion.
blindriver 1y ago
> But having a sterile environment in the mouth or on the skin is certainly detrimental to health. Can you point to a study that suggests this? I have no opinion one way or another but making statements like this without any backing is misinformation.
- dham 1y ago
  Just like the gut you have to have the right bacteria. Not none. This is a study on Psoriasis which is caused by systematic inflamation. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9076720/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9076720/
- ebolyen 1y ago
  It is the initial purpose of a microbiome to be at least commensal, in that it is usually prohibitively expensive to maintain a sterile environment so the odds of a true pathogen colonizing a system is greatly reduced if you simply have a crowded space of neutral participants. Once that's true it does seem there's a lot of host and microbiome interactions we've only begun to explore, but it shouldn't be surprising that co-evolution of the microbiome and host begins to take over as soon as you have one. One great example is short-chain-fatty-acid (SCFA) producing bacteria in the human gut. [1] These seem to be essential, and if there was a general takeaway to improve health, it would be to eat your roughage so they can do their job. This is also why high alpha-diversity (community richness in particular) is such a dead-ringer for healthy vs diseased states. And frustratingly, is often exactly where the story ends for a lot of observational studies. Also, in case you are curious, artificially sterile mice (gnotobiotic mice) tend to act differently than other mice, which is pretty odd to be honest, and why the gut-brain axis is a plausible mechanism to research further. [2] [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180739/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180739/ [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889159125003198 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915912...
- iammrpayments 1y ago
  Cavities are caused by corrosion from acid produced by a bacteria called streptococus mutans, they digest the sugar in your mouth and produce acid, they thrive in slightly acidic environments. If you have other types of bacteria in your mouth, they will leave less sugar to be digested and will also produce byproducts that make leave your mouth ph less acidic.
- johnea 1y ago
  This one only discusses the benefits of the microbiome in broad terms, but it has a bunch of interesting introductory info: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6503789/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6503789/ tl;dr > The oral microbiome usually exists in the form of a biofilm. It plays a crucial role in maintaining oral homeostasis, protecting the oral cavity, and preventing disease development. That NIH article also refers to some fields that are experiencing wide recent advances: the gut/brain axis, and communication from the skin microbiota that stimulates the first immune responses to pathogenic organisms. This link describes some aspects of the skin microbiome: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250402/How-your-skine28099s-microbes-shape-immunity-inflammation-and-chronic-skin-disease.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250402/How-your-skine280... I up-voted your post. I don't think there should be a penalty for asking for a reference. Although, I'm not always in the mood to dig up _good_ links on subjects that I've read enough to form an opinion.

panabee 1y ago

The association between pathogens and cancer is under-appreciated, mostly due to limitations in detection methods. For instance, it is not uncommon for cancer studies to design assays around non-oncogenic strains, or for assays to use primer sequences with binding sites mismatched to a large number of NCBI GenBank genomes. Another example: studies relying on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which is a rich database for cancer investigations. However, the TCGA made a deliberate tradeoff to standardize quantification of eukaryotic coding transcripts but at the cost of excluding non-poly(A) transcripts like EBER1/2 and other viral non-coding RNAs -- thus potentially understating viral presence. Enjoy the rabbit hole. :)

edem 1y ago
can you translate this to English?

pessimizer 1y ago

The real question always is: assuming causation, if you drastically improve the oral health of 1000 people, how many would you save from pancreatic cancer? The answer to this question in associative studies is very often in the single figures, or lower (i.e. fractions of people.) Anything to create an excuse to provide better dental care for people, though. The chance of getting a gum infection that spreads to your brain and/or goes septic is actually quite high.

pixl97 1y ago
Dental health is also correlated with a number of other illnesses and there is some literature suggesting different pathogens as a cause. Instead of looking at just one illness/death prevented it may be a much higher number if all forms are considered.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  I don't know why this is always controversial in modern society, but it's always important to do the math, rather than immediately go all in on whatever supports your current lifestyle or the lifestyles of the people that you admire or fetishize. There are plenty of good reasons to give people medical care. Clean mouths may be beneficial in many other ways other than allowing me to be within 5' of you when your mouth is open. Militant advocacy for innumeracy is a worse disease than pancreatic cancer, though. I once had a gum infection so bad that the uncontrollable diarrhea it gave me had me so dehydrated, I was afraid I was going to pass out and die alone in my apartment (as has happened to many, many people.) I went to the emergency room and I had to beg them to pay attention to me at all. They recommended a dentist appointment. I could barely stand. Finally, one that wasn't mentally disabled recognized my distress and gave me an IV. Do you think this would change if I said that it might triple my risk of pancreatic cancer from nearly nothing to nearly nothing? No. This study is something to add a completely spurious and inconsequential fact to toothpaste commercials, that's it. It reaches no conclusion that could help anyone with anything. If they intend to isolate the particular microbes that are more associated, and if those have an association with something that may also have an association with pancreatic cancer; or anything other than the p-hacking that this sounds like, it would be a different story.

layer8 1y ago

1) I find numbers like “3-fold increased risk” a bit meaningless without knowing the baseline risk. 2) Here is an audio interview with one of the authors of the study: https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/audio-player/19004027 https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/audio-player/19004027

glenstein 1y ago
>1) I find numbers like “3-fold increased risk” a bit meaningless without knowing the baseline risk. Yeah, I don't see this talked about enough. If it's three fold from 33% baseline to 99%, thats a big deal. If it's a three fold increase from 0.000000033% to 0.000000099%, even the new number is minuscule. It's why, say, blue M&M's increasing risk of cancer by 75% isn't necessarily as big a problem as it sounds.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
lisbbb 1y ago
My father-in-law who died of pancreatic cancer in 2016 had excellent oral health. In fact, he never had a single cavity in his entire 76 years of life.
- viraptor 1y ago
  And there are chain smokers without lung issues. Anecdata really doesn't provide us much information.
Fomite 1y ago
This is, among other things, a quirk of both statistics (models with relative effect measures are better behaved/easier than ones with absolute measures outside toy examples) and early causal inference where we underestimated just how bad smoking is for you. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20010205/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20010205/

dham 1y ago

I've been saying what we actually need is universal dental care vs universal health care for over 15 years. Giving out universal health care without dental care is like changing the oil in a car but failing to see the tires aren't even on. I heard horror stories from my mom who worked in a periodontist office (as receptionist) growing up. Really got me to care about oral health early on. Health really starts at the mouth. If you don't have a healthy mouth you'll never have a healthy body.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago
I find it completely strange that dental care isn't just considered part of standard healthcare. Like, so my employer's health care plan covers every part of my body except my mouth? Why does my mouth specifically need its own plan?
- wormius 1y ago
  Here's an article about the history of that: https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/reason-your-dental-work-isn-t-covered-medical-insurance-ncna813666 https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/reason-your-dental-wor...
- atombender 1y ago
  It's a really unfortunate historical accident, especially in the US. Dentistry evolved relatively late compared to regular medicine, and early oral procedures were mostly tooth extractions, which ended up being predominantly done by barbers, who would also do surgery (!). These procedures were often considered crude and beneath that of a trained doctor, and they were generally performed by self-trained practitioners. There were several attempts in the 1800s to integrate dentistry into mainstream medicine, but they failed, both because the doctors of the time didn't think of dentistry as being a real science, but also because, as dentistry started to legitimize itself, the dentists themselves preferred being separate. For some reason the same separation also evolved in the U.K., but it's more integrated in other countries. For example, basic dental coverage is part of national healthcare in Germany and Japan. In the U.S., dentists have their own schools and licensing boards and so on, which isn't the case in the rest of the world, where dentistry is usually accepted as a regular branch of medicine and taught at the same universities.

donperignon 1y ago

Or maybe a compromised inmune system is what allow candida to flourish…

djmips 1y ago
Perhaps an issue like diabetes in which the high blood sugar provides an inviting environment for candida and also weakens the immune system.

anonzzzies 1y ago

I am sure many more will be linked to our mouths and we will regret that countries with good free public healthcare don't include dental. People just cannot afford to go until it hurts which often means it is very bad already.

edem 1y ago

so what was the baseline risk that was increased 3-fold?

ekianjo 1y ago
You know the numbers are bullshit when they never tell you: - the baseline risk - the increased risk In the same article. And yet HN commenters are easily manipulated into thinking that suddenky oral health is a big driver of pancreatic cancer.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  > And yet HN commenters are easily manipulated into thinking that suddenky oral health is a big driver of pancreatic cancer. This isn't happening, this is you starting from a solipsist axiom that you're smarter than everyone else, who comparatively must be automatons about receiving information.

Earw0rm 1y ago

It's unsurprising that certain strains would lead to increased cancer risk. We've known about this with bacteria (H. Pylori and stomach cancer), viruses (HPV and genital cancers) and fungi (carcinogenic liver toxins) for a long time. But I do somewhat wonder about the dental profession's "nuke it all" approach to the oral microbiome. We've largely moved away from that for other outside-facing body parts - it's recognised that for organs like skin, gut, vagina, scalp etc that there is such a thing as a healthy, balanced microbiome. I expect they'll get around to discovering the same for the mouth at some point - that if you have the right bacteria and don't overfeed them with massive amounts of glucose and fructose, that's broadly a healthier mouth than blasting everything to oblivion at every opportunity.

zemvpferreira 1y ago
This has not been my experience with dentistry. If anything they advise against alcohol-based mouthwashes etc.
cinntaile 1y ago
Do you mean that brushing your teeth with toothpaste blasts everything to oblivion? I have a hard time believing that.
- whatevaa 1y ago
  Probably meant antibacterial mouth washes.
  - cinntaile 1y ago
    I see, but that hasn't been standard care for at least a decade as far as I know?

semessier 1y ago

which begs the question that which daily mouthwash is a) broadband effective against many including the right pathogens c) long-time, safe/tolerable for long time daily use. Candidate being Chlorhexidine 0.06% - are there opinions on it?

mrtesthah 1y ago
Mouthwash is probably bad for you: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7125030/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7125030/
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  It has always seemed suspect to me. Nuking the microbiome in your mouth seems equivalent to taking a daily broad spectrum antibiotic. It's gonna kill everything, good, bad, or indifferent.

TaupeRanger 1y ago

People are talking about dental hygiene in this thread, but it’s only mentioned once in the article, and only to suggest that a small portion of the microbes associated with cancer were also associated with dental disease. We literally don’t know if using mouthwash or brushing for 30 seconds longer (the main differences in dental hygiene habits among people reading this) has any effect on cancer risk, so what’s the point of even posting this?

chaostheory 1y ago
Because keeping your mouth clean is both cheap and easy. If there’s a minuscule chance that it will reduce any risk in cancer, why not? Besides, who wants bad breath?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- TaupeRanger 1y ago
  Because we don’t know either way. There’s also a minuscule chance that doing extra cleaning might lead to the opposite effect, as evidenced by another reply here. We don’t know. This article mentions nothing about halitosis.
  - chaostheory 1y ago
    Yes, but it’s so cheap and easy to do both time-wise and cost wise that it’s a completely moot point.
lq9AJ8yrfs 1y ago
What if we helped everybody look better and smell better and it turned out it was all for nothing?
- TaupeRanger 1y ago
  If “for nothing” includes an increase in disease from eradicating an otherwise healthy oral microbiome by over-cleaning/washing, well I don’t think I need to answer that. Since we don’t know either way, best avoid drawing a conclusion.

MillironX 1y ago

> scientists have uncovered a mechanism that could help explain this connection, finding that bacteria can travel through swallowed saliva into the pancreas Except, this study didn't do that. It did shotgun sequencing and found a correlation between certain microbial species (some were fungal, not bacterial) and cancer risk. It *did not* demonstrate anything about mechanism. Based on the way it's phrased, maybe this article is saying that previous studies have found a mechanism, and this study found the microbial culprits. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the full study to see if that's the case in its introduction or discussion. Even so, that's an incredibly misleading opening to the article.

mannanj 1y ago

People forget Breathing through the mouth is a recipe for poor oral microbes. This became mainstream when we gained softer foods and transitioned living to indoor places with high indoor air pollution. Normalize nose breathing again.