How Brushing Your Teeth Could Help Prevent a Heart Attack
People with gum disease are most likely to suffer from heart disease. Here’s what to do to reduce your risk — with a result similar to taking statin drugs.
Key takeaways:
- Thoroughly brushing teeth with toothpaste to remove plaque helps to keep gums healthy, preventing damaging inflammation in arteries which reduces risk of stroke and heart attacks.
- Using plaque-fighting toothpaste was successful in removing plaque with a 29 percent drop in inflammation levels.
- Other measures that help prevent accumulation of plaque include reducing sugar consumption.
The reduction in C-reactive protein seen with the better tooth cleaning could translate into a reduced risk of heart disease, but this would require a much larger and longer-term study to prove.
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