Doctor says sign in mouth could be red flag for heart attack

A surgeon and dental health expert has said that a sign in your mouth could be a key signifier of potential heart trouble. Speaking on the Zoe podcast, Dr Alp Kantarci said that having poor dental health was a serious problem in causing inflammation - which in turn leads to cardiovascular diseases and heart disease.

Dr Kantarci said that gum disease and the impact that it has on the stomach microbes and body in general had a big impact on inflammation - which puts the body in general under a lot of pressure. He explained how heart attacks and strokes come about and said: “Most of the cardiovascular diseases or cardiac diseases are the results of your blood vessels, mainly aorta becoming clogged, and the aorta is the major vessel coming out from your heart and distributing all the blood to that. That’s where you get the cardiac arrest.

“The aorta is like a hose and it comes all the way from your heart and goes into the rest of your body. So that hose is now being blocked by the lipids, by the fat layers internally, that cannot really pass through. That’s where you’re going to get a heart attack because if one of these blockage reaches to your heart and then it actually causes your heart not to function, then you’re going to heart attack.”

He said that the body getting these fat deposits, or lipids, means that if they break free from the aorta and hit another organ they can cause a stroke. A thrombus is a healthy response to injury intended to stop and prevent further bleeding but Dr Kantarci said it can “go anywhere, it can clog any part of your body. It can basically cause you to get paralysed and, and so forth.” And he said that the state of mouth can have a big impact: “So this is a process that can be completely aggravated and got worse by the gum disease through two mechanisms.

“So you treat two things. Number one, you reduce the bacterial load by treating gum disease. But the second one is that you’re also reducing your inflammatory burden on your body by treating gum disease.” Previously Dr Kantarci said that the inflammatory issues caused by gum disease also make conditions such as diabetes worse.

He said: ”So your inflammatory burden is one of the reasons why your diabetes gets worse. Your blood sugar goes up, your haemoglobin A1C levels go up and your response to diabetic treatments or diabetic drugs and so on and so forth will be completely impaired.

"This is the humbling moment that the dentist becomes a part of the medical team because we’re not treating diabetes. We treat our own diseases. We treat our teeth, we treat our gums, we treat our oral cavity, but we can help our medical colleagues treat their patients better if the patients are treated by us too.”

Zoe podcast CEO Jonathan Wolf added: “Well, I think everybody is going to be listening to this and thinking, I think I need to look after my teeth better than perhaps I thought 24 hours ago.”