A type of bacteria that causes dental plaque was found in 50% of colon cancers | Hacker News Reader

A type of bacteria that causes dental plaque was found in 50% of colon cancers

nbcnews.com

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My dentist has been on me for years that flossing is important for your health for more than just teeth. He explained to me recently the role it plays in toughening up your gums (essentially callusing your gums from the repeated abrasion of the dental floss) so that bacteria cannot thrive in there, which they otherwise easily do. And that this bacteria can cause you all kinds of health issues, including cancer.

If you search around you'll find a lot of articles from the dental community that talk about similar benefits from flossing.

After years of being lazy and ignoring their advice, this finally got me into regularly flossing!

What percentage of your gum surface do you expect to floss in a session?

It’s something I need to get better about, but man, it’s so tedious and if I try to do something else while flossing in invariably do a bad job at flossing.

Here’s my one unsolicited advice for the day, keep a pack of those little flossers in your car, at your desk, or somewhere else you are commonly. Then, use those after lunch daily, or while on a meeting.

I’ve done this and my dentist has noticed!

I hate floss, and while I dislike the little flosser picks less, they still annoy me too, but I have now discovered they sell large (8 inch long or so, similar to a toothbrush) sticks with a flosser head (replacable, extremely cheap) on them.

I love them and they've helped me floss more often! I can just get through it so quickly and it doesn't feel like a chore. Just great manueverability that lets you fly through it rather than keep figuring out how to reposition.

If you have a hard time getting yourself to floss daily, try them.

(I won't mention a specific brand name because that rankles my anticonsumerism, but, you can easily find it at the drugstore)

> Then, use those after lunch daily, or while on a meeting.

It took me a minute to connect this with "oh right, everyone's all on permanent wfh now".

Even though I'm also wfh 4 days out of 5.

This. This is the one. I have those little flossies in an opaque jar on my coffee table and invariably, every night after dinner, I have flossed. Make it easy to do and you might do it more often.

Get a waterpik or the Sonicare equivalent. Use it with very warm but not hot water and a half cap full of Peridex or mouthwash.

My dentist told me I build plaque faster than most, and asked me to floss more (I hadn't been flossing any.) Like you, I found straight flossing to be pretty challenging, but the hydrofloss routing I described takes less than a minute to floss, and is pleasant to boot,and my dentist finds it more effective for me than straight flossing ever was.

I find the waterpik is amazing at getting food out of my teeth, but I still need to floss to get the plaque off.

Same I hate using dental floss, never could get into the habit.

Waterpik changed my flossing habits for life, can't recommend it enough; I don't use the mouthwash, just warm water so that's a good tip.

Peridex nukes your mouth biome. That leaves it temporarily vulnerable to pathogenic bacteria. Normally you would prefer to have a biome consisting of benign bacteria which outcompete the pathogenic ones.

Coworker didn't go to the dentist for 30 years. Then needed a bunch of dental work to clear out a chronic infection before he could have surgery to replace a damaged heart valve. I'd heard that infections can spread from gums to your heart. This is the first case I've seen in the wild where that happened.

Here's an interesting data point: a while back, my dentist noted that my teeth had significantly less plaque than the last time I'd had a cleaning. I'd changed over to a low-carb diet in the interim, & they stayed in good shape between that cleaning & the one after that. I've seen similar reports from others. Could it be that plaque is a problem far more because of diet (sugars, grains) than because of insufficient flossing? It would be worth a study, especially if clear results came of it one way or the other.

I thought this was fairly common knowledge. Dentists have been against sweets/white bread/pop for a long time.

Their arguments are generally only about cavities, not about plaque buildup. Amazing how people always want to go to pharmaceuticals first instead of checking out other, simpler options.

Unless I’m mistaken it’s plaque that causes cavities.

I would say yes, and I think it's pretty common knowledge. Personally, my wife didn't have plaque buildup or dental problems for over 10yrs, so she never went to the dentist. After she moved to the US and started eating sugar she had to regularly visit the dentist.

FWIW, my dentist regularly comments that I have little to no plaque buildup. I don't floss. I eat a carb heavy diet, but complex carbs, few simple sugars/fructose. Also eat just once a day which might play into it.

This has been common knowledge since before I was a kid in the 1990s, when the local dentist on the block would give out apples and toothbrushes instead of candy on halloween, to the disappointment of many kids. And I don't think my local dentist was the only one.

Soda (and beer) in particular is one of the worst, perfectly designed to destroy your teeth since it's not just highly sweet, but also acidic and also a liquid and thus able to coat every nook and cranny

I would add acidic fruit to the list too.

There's a lot of positivity in this article about how this knowledge could help develop new drugs. But it seems the current reality is that this bacteria is becoming more common and blocks current cancer drugs. Can anyone with more knowledge on this explain further? Are outlooks getting worse until we find something that can deal with the bacteria discussed in the article?

Maybe with this we can combine teeth into normal insurance.

Honestly it's more likely that we'll pay higher premiums if we didn't have separate dental insurance.

Or if data brokers sell your shopping history to your insurance company and it shows you aren't buying floss regularly

Dental insurance isn't actually insurance.

In insurance, you win, and are made whole when you are unlucky enough to suffer from a low-frequency, high-cost event.

With dental 'insurance', you always pay partially out of pocket, and as soon as you hit a (rather small) cap, you pay the rest entirely out of pocket.

It's not an insurance, it's a limited-access subscription service.

I was just talking about this a few months ago. In my opinion, single-payer dental insurance should be provided before health insurance. If a country has single payer but provides no dental insurance, it's a waste, as a lot of issues start in the mouth. We're at the forefront of a lot of this right now (as well as gut health).

I have taken to calling them luxury bones. For some reason that seems to bother people around me.

Have there been any studies that show that people treated with antibiotics against F. Nucleatum showed improved outcomes in any of comorbid diseases? I'm not saying it would actually improve anything but would be interesting to see. I assume there isn't enough momentum to run a study like that.

As long as the pathogen lives on in dental biofilm, antibiotics might have a hard time reaching it - some forms of biofilm are not really penetrated by antibiotics (one reason why H Pylori is so hard to get rid of). From there it can just spread again when the round is finished.

It’s not even clear that this strain only builds biofilm in the oral cavity. Biofilm in the GI tract has just recently become a field of interest.

And I bet H2O was found in 100% of colon cancers.

Indeed, it would have been nice to know what percentage of the "half of whom did not have cancer" had this bacteria in their stool samples.

But they do imply later that the number should be low by stating "The bacteria is usually only found in the mouth, far from the colon."

> in the mouth, far from the colon

Speak for yourself

That the F.nucleatum bacterium is associated with colon cancer has been known for some time, e.g.: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27876571/

It is also associated with "poor rates of both overall survival and progression-free survival" in cervical cancer: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33197886/

And it is "associated with shorter survival" when found in esophageal cancer: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27769987/

It is also linked to gastric cancer: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-18596-0

All in all, it's obviously a pretty nasty little customer. It might be worth screening for it, and attempting to eliminate it if possible.

Vaccine candidate?

There's a benign bacteria being sold to outcompete it.

What's that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37634713

That's a different species of bacteria altogether.

> That's a different species of bacteria altogether.

likely hence the "out-compete", by a different species

The bacteria in the link is Streptococcus mutans, the species in this article is Fusobacterium nucleatum. They're not the same species, one can't be used to replace the other.

It can be, if they secrete inhibitory metabolites and/or compete for the same feeding substrates.

A $20k probiotic vs a $20 round of antibiotics?

In theory, a cure vs a paliative.

> Oh, for the ship-to-your-house version in May, we're dropping the price to $250

https://twitter.com/LanternBioworks/status/17699293904048991...

Well, at that price I might be interested.

Yes, that seems to be the case, at least in principle: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36634619/

I'm not aware of any actual projects in development, but it could certainly be that some are in their very early stages.

> it was unclear how it could withstand the journey through the gut

Boy do I have great news for them about a group of people with a proclivity of putting their mouths where they shouldn't.

I assume I saw this downvoted because people get defensive about intimacies they enjoy or because of the snarky tone, but this is actually a very astute insight into a recent cultural change that might legitimately play some role.

It wasn't a very common practice in earlier generations, it became an increasingly common practice in newer generations, and the shift could very easily produce unstudied consequences to health at scale (whether this or other things).

Do you have any reliable evidence to back up your assertion that the activity in question "wasn't a very common practice in earlier generations"? The fact that something isn't openly discussed rarely means it's not happening...

Considering the popularity of porn and its obvious impact on sexual practices (monkey see, monkey do) plus the higher hygiene standards I would imagine butt-eating is more widespread now then ever. I’d also imagine cleaning the soon to be eaten butt would lower the risk

You got the infection route backwards, the cancer causing plaque bacteria migrate from mouth to butt !

But more seriously it's a gram negative bacteria so it has a polysaccharide armor that could resist a passage through the digestive system.

I mean, I can't speak for what was unmentionably hot in the 19th century or whatever, but there are many many living people who were plenty free-spirited during the 20th century and are quite open about what they did and do get up to, and many graphic literary and media accounts of the same.

There are also many much older literary sources on practice and technique that are quite rich and detailed but don't really give it much attention.

You're correct that none of that can provide authoritative counter-evidence to the claim that it's always been as popular and widespread as it is today, but given that many practices do come in and out of fashion, it's easier for most to assume that the particular quiet of the oral and literary historical record about this is because it wasn't popular than that it is the one secret thing that nobody blabbed about in topical literature or ran across much in their own experience. I didn't even think it's recent, dramatic rise in popularity was contentious until you pushed back on it just now.

I'd personally put the burden of proof on demonstrating that it was similarly common rather than that it wasn't. But I would understand those determined to disagree.

There are cultural trends and fashions in intimate practice, though, whether or not you accept that this is one of them.

> It wasn't a very common practice in earlier generations, it became an increasingly common practice in newer generations

...followed by...

> I mean, I can't speak for what was unmentionably hot in the 19th century or whatever

...seems to indicate you should not have been so confident in your initial assertion. A great number of things were likely less mention-able in prior generations, including the act of hetero-normative sex; I suspect people had plenty of sex then, considering we exist at all.

> The fact that something isn't openly discussed rarely means it's not happening...

Surely not being openly discussed isn't evidence of it being extremely prevalent either. And given that, it's really hard to imagine reliable evidence one way or the other. But the person you're responding to did not make an obviously ridiculous statement. We all know it's not provable, but I'll happily give them the benefit of the doubt here.

I assume the reason for the downvoting is because gp called out the people rather than just stating what the activity is. This is leading to us assuming what each responder considers the most likely activity.

I don’t know about that but what I can tell you was a very common practice in all earlier generations was drinking hard liquor. What does it do to bacteria?

This is not what the historical record says at all, actually hilariously quite the opposite and this assumption is quite modern and common especially in the West.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-03/young-ad...

For one, quite famous historical example see the Kama Sutra. It does not take more than a quick Google search to find a million other examples, eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_art_in_Pompeii_and_He...

Check out this AskHistorians thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17zztg/how_c...

We're talking about a specific practice here, and in fact I rely on the lack of general prudeness to elaborate on my point in another reply.

Because people have been getting it on quite creatively forever and because they were often writing about it (and because many older living people got around too), we can make reasonable -- if not authoritative -- suppositions about the specific things that people were getting up to in various communities at various times

You are totally correct. The practice is so old there is a latin word for it

I prefer syrup

What group of people?

people

I've thought about this for minutes. It is a bit of a puzzle, but my best hypothesis is that it's about people that eat ass.

Yes! I can't believe how many people feign ignorance in this thread.

No matter how clean you make the exterior the interior is still a live colony of things that shouldn't be in your mouth. It turns out there are things in your mouth that shouldn't be in your arse.

I upvoted this because it's hilarious. But I would point out that FMT is a thing and can be beneficial if the donor is in better health than you. Scientifically speaking.

Not feigning ignorance, just wanting people to own up to what they really mean. By saying a "group of people", I am ass(uming) the poster is not talking about the lobby of Big Ass.

Toddlers? That was my first thought..

you want to at the end of the centipede?

So you're saying it is now scientifically proven that butt-chugging mouthwash both prevents and cures cancer, and that young people especially benefit?

I don't think mouthwash is selective like that

The only thing you could extrapolate is that using mouth wash may reduce the activity of that bacteria. Anything else would have to be proven.

Which might have other unintended side effects!

See [0] where mouthwash use is correlated with increased risk of hypertension

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31709856/

Also bacteria communities are very hard to study because one dying might make another one that was under control grow out of control and cause its own set of issues.

Given the high alcohol content of mouthwash, this seems like a good way to get very drunk very quickly

Reputable mouthwash products no longer include alcohol, it's been deemed undesirable because it dries out your mouth.

I tried Crest's alcohol-free mouthwash:

Pros:

- It worked really well, fresh breath for hours.

Cons:

- It nuked my taste buds for just a long.

I'm back on the boozy mouth wash (Listerine og formula)

I like xylitol mouthwash. Xyloburst is good

Read up on throat and mouth cancer from mouthwash

Mouthwash containing alcohol to be exact

The problem with proving something is bad is it takes generations. What they replaced alcohol with is likely no better, like BPA substitites.

Seems to be pretty low risk, do you know of some better sources that I couldn't find?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10681539/

> We found evidence that a high frequency of mouthwash use may be associated with an increased risk of oral cancer. However, despite the biological plausibility for this association, we suggest caution upon interpretation of our findings due to the few number of studies that have investigated the mouthwash use frequency, which should be considered.

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