Dentists Tiverton RI

Dental Caries

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By Sara Altshul

It’s an ancient battle—humans versus disease-causing bacteria. Until the mid-1940s, the germs had the edge: Bacterial illnesses like pneumonia were frequently fatal. When researchers discovered how to mass-produce penicillin and other antibiotics after World War II, we smugly thought we’d won the war.

But you can’t turn your back on bacteria. Insidiously, the germs mutated to create defenses against antibiotics—80 percent of Staphylococcus aureus strains, which are responsible for toxic shock syndrome and other infections, became penicillin-resistant. Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the tuberculosis germ, now resists streptomycin, formerly a gold- standard TB treatment.

“The more antibiotics we use, the more problems we have with resistant bacteria,” says A.H. ‘Lon’ Jones, DO, retired clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Texas Tech University Medical School, Hale Center, Texas. “We need other options.”

Defeating dental caries

Enter xylitol. Rather than attacking germs, this natural sugar alcohol appears to interfere with germs’ ability to stick to tooth or cellular surfaces where they form colonies that cause disease. Xylitol’s ability to prevent tooth decay is very well established, and evidence mounts for its role in fighting ear and sinus infections. Given the way it works, xylitol presents an elegant solution to pathology. Instead of killing disease-promoting bacteria, xylitol may enable us to peacefully coexist with them, suggests Luc Trahan, PhD, a xylitol researcher at Université Laval in Québec, Canada.

Here’s how. Streptococccus mutans, a mouth-dwelling, cavity-promoting bacterium, metabolizes sucrose—common sugar—and excretes lactic acid. Through that process it creates an acidic environment that dissolves tooth enamel, opening the door to tooth decay. But dental plaque bacteria cannot digest xylitol. Instead, the xylitol accumulates within their cells as xylitol phosphate and prevents the bacteria from growing. Then, says Trahan, regular exposure to xylitol may actually select natural mutant colonies of harmless bacteria that “crowd out” the decay-causing bacteria.

Since 1970, more than 300 studies have proven xylitol’s ability to decrease cavities. When 10-year-old Estonian children were given xylitol gum or candy three times each schoolday (for a total of 5 grams per day), the number of cavities they developed dropped by 33 to 59 percent after three years. In a Finnish study, chewing xylitol gum between meals reduced cavities in teenagers by 30 to 60 percent. In Belize, where children eat lots of sugary treats and have sky-high cavity rates, not only did children who chewed 100 percent xylitol gum have 27 percent fewer pre-cavity lesions become cavities, the surfaces of their teeth actually hardened again. When the children’s permanent teeth came in, the rate of cavities plummeted by up to 90 percent.

And what’s more astonishing, the protection may even begin before birth. In Scandinavia...

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