Not one but two new studies have revealed that stress on a continuous basis can negatively impact oral health of elderly humans and also lead to a decline in the cognitive functioning in them. It has been always said that oral health is a good indicator of a humans overall health. But, not many of us know that a declining oral health could be an indication of other risky health conditions that can also affect the quality of life of a human being.
An article published in the Journal of Indian Society of Periodontology shows that there is a link between tooth loss as well as gum disease with stroke occurrence.
As per the conclusions of this article of 2010, gum disease is responsible for increase in the risk of heart attack by 20%. Well, there’s another team at the University of New Brunswick, NJ are focusing on a connection between oral health and cognitive decline.
Even a research team from Rutgers University carried out a two separate studies around perceived stress and cognitive decline and published the reports of two separate studies in the Journal of American Geriatrics Society.
Talking about other parts of the world like for example China, XinQi Dong, the director of Rutgers University’s Institute for Health, healthcare policy and aging research says that in china it was the ethnic and racial minorities who were typically vulnerable to consequences of poor oral health. The reason being that already there are barriers like socio economic status and language plus access to preventive dental care is less. Particularly, the old Chinese Americans are at a risk of oral health problems because of lack of regular dental checkup and dental insurance. These studies were carried out on Chinese elderly in Chicago of 60 years and above age. The study involved quizzing question around oral health and then asking them to complete five cognitive tests. The second study asked people if they had faced issues like dry mouth besides measuring their social strain levels, social support and perceived stress with the help of pre-defined scales.
The study involved 2700 Chinese Americans and results revealed that around half of them did had symptoms of tooth related issues. Also, there was not significant relationship between congnitive issues and gums but researchers believe that the participants may not have reported gum problems and ignored them as they do not cause major problems to health.
*Sourced from Internet
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