Might brushing your teeth protect against cancer? The suggestion looks like it belongs in the pages of an unreliable tabloid, but scientific evidence for the link is strong and growing.
Take head and neck cancer, which kills some 450,000 people worldwide every year. It’s associated with smoking and drinking alcohol, which is one reason why the most common form of the disease, oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), tends to cluster in under resourced areas. But plenty of people diagnosed with OSCC say they never drank nor smoked, so researchers have been looking for other possible causes.
One likely candidate is gum disease. A series of studies have identified periodontitis, a bacterial infection that eats away soft tissue and eventually bone around teeth, as a risk factor for OSCC. That might be because the disease changes the behavior of usually benign bugs that live in the mouth.
A study published late ...
