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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

This raises two questions.

- Does this suggest that courses of antibiotics might reduce heart attack risk?

- Does this suggest that regular use of, e.g., Listerine might reduce heart attack risk? (While, perhaps, slightly increasing esophageal cancer risk.)

It would be interesting to run an epidemiological study to see if current interventions move the needle in a meaningful way.

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Listerine would make it worse for sure.

Don't use "antiseptic" mouthwash; it kills beneficial bacteria in the mouth, causing bad bacteria to multiply.

I have personal experience of this.

agreed, after much research the only mouth wash i use is therasol

For the Listerine part: they are referencing this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16373688/ that seems to show a correlation between poor oral health and sudden cardiac death, so it might help indeed, with other good oral health practices.

I only use very dilute Listerine - for the fluoride. A dentist told me that undiluted, alcohol based products can cause tissue damage (which conceivably would result in a vector for oral bacteria infiltrating to the bloodstream?)

Most Listerine products do not contain fluoride. Additionally, there are a variety of readily available alcohol-free mouthwashes that have fluoride.

Alcohol-free mouthwash is even more likely to cause tissue damage because they almost all contain SLS. Some people are more sensitive to it than others (causing the mucosa to peel) but it causes mild damage to everybody.

Almost all? I just checked and Act, Crest, CloSYS and many others are all SLS-free and alcohol-free. The only one with SLS I could find is Listerine Cool Mint.

Maybe you’re thinking toothpastes? SLS in toothpaste is indeed hard to avoid.

the purple one does. That's what the dentist recommended

I probably should find sources first but I was always under the impression that the mouth biome is strongly correlated to gut biome which strongly correlated to immune system.

Yes, there are studies where they compared heart attack rates for people who'd taken a course of antibiotics with those who hadn't and there was quite a large effect in some of them.

eg. https://www.science.org/content/article/antibiotics-cut-hear...

TFA says the biofilms protect the bacteria from antibiotics. Better approach is probably engineered antibodies or even a phage (engineered virus that attacks the bacteria).

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