I would think the risk of the infection spreading amd resultant problems from NOT treating a root canal would be higher. Consider that untreated infections of the jaw could easily travel to the brain...........
Geez, what next??!! I heard that you can use SPAM to fix most dental problems You're not going to get anywhere with this nonsensical post on this forum. Go away and quit bringing it back to the top. Molar,A new study led by a University of California, Berkeley, researcher could give women a little extra motivation to visit their dentist more regularly. The study suggests that women who get dental care reduce their risk of heart attacks, stroke and other cardiovascular problems by at least one-third. The analysis, which used data from nearly 7,000 people ages 44-88 enrolled in the Health and Retirement Study, did not find a similar benefit for men.
Published online Sept. 29 in the journal Health Economics, the study compared people who went to the dentist during the previous two years with those who did not.
"Many studies have found associations between dental care and cardiovascular disease, but our study is the first to show that general dental care leads to fewer heart attacks, strokes, and other adverse cardiovascular outcomes in a causal way," said study lead author Timothy Brown, assistant adjunct professor of health policy and management at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health.
In the world of health and medical studies, causality is typically determined through randomized controlled trials in which two or more groups of people are essentially equal, except for the receipt of a treatment or intervention, such as a new drug, a periodontal procedure or a health education class. The group that did not receive the treatment – the control group – is compared with the group that did. Differences in outcomes between the groups are attributed to the treatment.
But randomized controlled trials are not always possible, so researchers sometimes turn to a statistical approach called the method of instrumental variables to rule out other potential factors that could account for different outcomes between groups. The use of instrumental variables is common among economists to evaluate the effects of economic policies, but it is less well-known in the clinical setting.
"While relatively short randomized controlled trials of specific types of dental treatment are possible, we can't run long-term randomized controlled trials of whether general dental care reduces cardiovascular disease events like heart attacks and strokes," said Brown, a health economist. "Individuals randomized to the treatment group would enjoy general dental care and those randomized to the control group would get no dental care at all. Many, if not most, people in the control group would simply get dental care on their own, destroying the experimental design, and making the results of the experiment worthless. The method of instrumental variables allows us to avoid this problem."
The method helped researchers rule out self-selection bias, or the possibility that people who seek out dental care are different – perhaps healthier in general – than those who don't.
Data from the Health and Retirement Study had been collected every two years from 1996 to 2004. This longitudinal study followed the same individuals over time, and each biennial survey included questions on whether subjects had visited the dentist and whether they had experienced a heart attack, stroke, angina or congestive heart failure during the prior two years. Deaths from heart attacks or strokes were also included in the analysis. The study took into account other risk factors, such as alcohol and tobacco use, high blood pressure and body mass index.
The fact that men and women did not benefit equally from dental care did not completely surprise the researchers. "To my knowledge, previous studies in this area have found that the relationship between poor oral health and cardiovascular disease markers varies by gender, but none have examined differences between men and women with regard to actual cardiovascular disease events," said Brown, who is also associate director of research at UC Berkeley's Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets & Consumer Welfare.
"We think the findings reflect differences in how men and women develop cardiovascular disease," said study co-author Dr. Stephen Brown, a first-year obstetrician/gynecologist resident at the West Virginia University Charleston Division School of Medicine. "Other studies suggest that estrogen has a protective effect against heart disease because it helps prevent the development of atherosclerosis. It's not until women hit menopause around age 50 to 55 that they start catching up with men."
The study authors suggest that for dental care to have a protective effect, it should occur early in the development of cardiovascular disease.
The researchers did not have data on the type of procedures used during the dental visit, but they pointed to other studies that indicated three-fourths of older adult dental visits involved preventive services, such as cleaning, fluoride and sealant treatments.
Oral health experts recommend twice-yearly visits to the dentist, as well as brushing and flossing at least twice a day. Those wearing dentures should make sure they stay clean to prevent the growth and buildup of plaque and bacteria.
The history of blaming teeth for human disease has a very long history going back to Hippocrates who is said to have reported the cure of arthritis after the removal of a tooth. Today, such diseases as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer's disease are mistakenly blamed on "bad" teeth.
Hunter's theories were later codified by Weston A. Price, D.D.S. (1870-1948). Price studied primitive cultures and concluded that "modern civilization" was the cause of ill health and that people living in primitive conditions were actually healthier than modern people. His examination of the primitive cultures in question were quite superficial, and his conclusions were simplistic ignoring such statistics as their short life expectancy, high rates of infant mortality, endemic diseases, and malnutrition. Price also performed poorly designed studies that led him to conclude that teeth treated with root canal therapy leaked bacteria or bacterial toxins into the body, causing all sorts of dreaded diseases including those attributed by Hunter to the theory of Oral Sepsis. Research studies performed in the 1930s and 1940s and those conducted in later years showed no relationship between the presence of endodontically treated teeth and the presence of illness. Instead, researchers found that people with root canal fillings were no more likely to be ill than people without them.
The technical name for the theory that encouraged souls in previous eras to blame systemic diseases on the presence of bad teeth is the "theory of anachoresis" (pronounced "ana-co-ree-sis"), or the "theory of focal infection". According to this theory, an infection in or around a tooth (the "focus of infection") could theoretically be carried by the bloodstream to other parts of the body. Originally, the hypothesis that a bad tooth could cause cancer or other systemic diseases was based on ancient holistic theories of medicine and "proven" by anecdotal evidence (the occasional case that seemed to confirm the theory). In the early 1800s, Benjamin Rush, an American physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, is said to have observed the cure of a case of arthritis of the hip by tooth extraction.
The theory of focal infection probably reached its apotheosis in the 1920's, between the two world wars, when huge numbers of people were subjected to full mouth extraction of all their teeth, as well as removal of various "unnecessary" organs in order to cure every imaginable disease. One example of "research" in this area is on display in this excerpt from an essay on Victorian insane asylums in England, many of which were still in operation as late as the 1980's. Here, the emphasis was on curing madness:
| "Attempts at cures were often more desperate than well-advised. One of the asylums of my city had the best-equipped operating theater of its time, where an enthusiastic psychiatrist partially eviscerated his patients and also removed all their teeth, on the theory that madness was caused by a chronic but undetected and subclinical infection (called “focal sepsis”) in the organs that he removed." (Click here to read this excellent--and long--essay by Theodore Dalrymple.) |
Most of the applications of the theory of focal infection were disproved with the emerging science of the 1930's and 1940's. The reasons for the demise of the theory are as follows:
Science was never able to prove that the theory of focal infection was actually valid. Numerous instances of anecdotal evidence (the occasional case that seemed to confirm the theory) had been used for centuries to prove the theory of focal infection, but very few scientifically controlled experiments were carried out. In the limited number that were, the theory's advocates were never able to prove any linkage between teeth and systemic disease. As a result, they remained wedded to anecdotal proof. It is now generally accepted among the scientific community that anecdotal evidence is not a valid approach in scientific research.
When the offending tooth, teeth or organ was removed, patients rarely were cured of their disease, as promised by the proponents of the theory of focal infection. This eliminated much of the credibility of the theory.
Sometimes, the disease would actually be exacerbated (made worse) by the removal of the supposed focus of infection.
Improvement in dental care greatly reduced the incidence of widespread dental disease in the general population reducing the popularity of blaming bad teeth for systemic disease.
The advent of antibiotics largely eliminated much of the mortality associated with dental infections. This, along with improved overall dental health in the general population eliminated much of the anger that many people once directed toward their diseased teeth and reduced the previously widespread desire to have them all extracted and replaced with dentures.
The list of diseases that were supposedly caused by bad teeth kept shrinking as the true causes of these diseases were discovered over the course of time.
The unfavorable reaction to the "orgy" of dental extractions and tonsillectomies that were advocated by the proponents of the theory eventually undermined the trust of the population. From approximately the end of the nineteenth century up until shortly after WWII, millions of perfectly healthy people lost their perfectly healthy teeth due to the theory that early extraction would prevent numerous diseases later in life, and also because it was extremely lucrative for the surgeons who extracted the teeth, and the dentists who made the dentures.
The theory of focal infection is kept alive today by the American legal tort system (lawyers using junk science to turn a profit), the holistic health movement, and even by a relatively small number of dentists who rely on these debunked theories to sell holistic (spa) dentistry to wealthy patrons. Dentists selling these services generally are true believers. "The patient's ills can be cured if the offending teeth are extracted and replaced with implants, or if their amalgam fillings are all removed and replaced with composites or crowns." This belief is, however based on the debunked theories of Hunter and Price, and not on scientific evidence.
The holistic movement has tried to update the concept of anachoresis by renaming it. In the mid 1970's, the term "cavitational osteopathosis" ("CO") was coined. In the 1980's it was renamed "neuralgia inducing cavitational osteonecrosis" ("NICO"). The new names have not changed the concept underlying the theory; and the science underlying the theory remains the same as it was in the early 20th century.
This is not to say that there is NO validity to the theory of anachoresis. Bacteria from an infection any place in the body CAN be carried by the blood or lymphatic system to distant parts of the body where they can form another infection. The symptoms of this sort of anachoresis are, however, quite specific and do not resemble any disease entity except a straight forward organic infection. They include infections of the heart (sub-acute bacterial endocarditis), especially in persons who have had a history of rheumatic fever or heart murmur, and on rare occasions, infections of implanted appliances such as artificial joints. There is NO indication that there is a correlation between the teeth and any other disease entity for which the cause is otherwise unknown.