Dr. Bob's Mouthly Report

Ultra-processed foods – think chips, cookies or your average fast-food meal – have been again and again tied to adverse health outcomes.

Two new studies from France and Spain, both published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal, show that consuming convenient junk food has been linked to increased heart disease and early death.

"It's a really worrisome trend," Dr. Erin Michos, the associate director of preventive cardiology at Johns Hopkins University, told USA TODAY. "As food has become more industrialized and globalized, diets have transitioned from where everyone has to sit down as a family and eat freshly-made food into food that's highly palatable, easy to eat and easy to prepare." Michos was not involved in the study.

The findings follow a study published last year that links ultra-processed food to cancer.

Ultra-processed food is defined as food "with a low nutritional quality and high energy density." How do you know if something is ultra-processed? "If it contains more than five ingredients, it's probably ultra-processed," said Michos.

The Spanish project from Seguimiento Universidad de Navarra, a cohort of university volunteers from Universidad de Navarra, tracked dietary data from nearly 20,000 participants over the course of 15 years using a 136-item food questionnaire.

Researchers found that those who consumed more than four servings a day of ultra-processed foods had a 62% increased risk of early mortality. 

Each additional serving of ultra-processed food, after four servings, increased mortality rates by 18%.

Read more at USA Today

Health care costs are the top financial issue facing most American families, according to a new Gallup poll released Thursday.

About 17 percent of Americans said health care was their most significant financial issue, followed by 11 percent citing lack of money or low wages, 8 percent saying college expenses, 8 percent saying the cost of owning or renting a home and 8 percent saying taxes.

Health care costs were also the most significant financial issue for Americans in 2017 and nearly tied with lack of money or low wages for the top spot in 2018, according to the poll.

Health care costs are most likely to be the top concerns for older Americans, with 25 percent of adults between the ages of 50 and 64, and 23 percent of those aged 65 and older listing them as their top financial problems. Health care costs tie with lack of money, college expenses and housing costs as the greatest financial worries among adults younger than 50. 

Health care also ranked as the top financial concern for Americans among all income levels.

Health care costs, energy costs or oil and gas prices and lack of money or low wages are the only three issues to ever top the “most important family financial problem” question in the 48 times Gallup has asked it since 2005.

Read more at The Hill

The improved quality of dental implants is enhancing the development of the market in recent years. The augmented number of cases requiring dental implants either due to ailments or injury is expected to rise, directing to favorable progress in the dental implant market. Moreover, increased inflow of capital from medical devices manufacturers is expected to create promising options for progress in the upcoming period.

The competitors have adopted diversified plans to increase their chances for success in the market. The creation of great competitive advantages is expected to aid in the development of the market. A substantial ascent in the number of promoters in the market is anticipated to shape a beneficial state of activities for the growth of the market in the forecasted period. The access to vital planned prospects imperative to the resultant stabilization of inflation is likely to produce a promising option for advancement in the forthcoming years. The growth of the market is influenced by the presence of factors that are stimulating the growth of the market. The need to create a sustainable competitive advantage has accelerated the progress of the market in the forecast period. The diversified consumer tastes and trends in the market are anticipated to lead to an escalated development rate in the market. The use of strategic tools to further the development of the market in the coming years.

The central contenders in the Dental Implant Market are:

3M (US),

Osstem Implant (South Korea),

Nobel Biocare (US),

Dentsply Sirona (US),

Zimmer Biomet (US),

CAMLOG Biotechnologies AG (Switzerland),

Institut Straumann AG (Switzerland),

Neobiotech USA. Inc. (US) among others.

Read more at Medgadget

(Reuters Health) - Seniors who feel their life has purpose may be less likely to die from heart, circulatory and digestive diseases and more likely to live longer, new data suggest.

In a study that followed nearly 7,000 people over age 50 for more than a decade, researchers determined that people were more likely to die at a younger age if they felt their lives had little purpose, according to the report published in JAMA Network Open.

“We found a strong association between life purpose and mortality in the U. S.,” said the study’s lead author, Leigh Pearce of the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “This has also been found in a number of studies conducted in a number of populations and seems to be quite a robust association.”

What constitutes “life purpose?”

“I think it’s about what people think is most valuable to them,” Pearce said. “Community, achievement, reputation, relationships, spirituality, kindness—these can all feed into any one person’s life purpose. So there is not a specific definition for any one person.”

Read more at Reuters

Although the woman in her 50s had been effectively treated for depression, she remained plagued by symptoms that often accompany it: fatigue, sleepiness and lethargy, even though she thought she was getting enough sleep.

With depression no longer causing her persistent symptoms, her psychiatrist advised her to consult a sleep specialist.

Sure enough, a night in the sleep lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine revealed that while the woman was supposedly asleep, she experienced micro-awakenings about 18 times an hour, resulting in sleep that restored neither body nor brain. All night long, she would stop breathing for more than 10 seconds at a time, followed by a mini-arousal and a snore as she gasped for breath to raise the depleted oxygen level in her blood.

Diagnosis: Obstructive sleep apnea, an increasingly common yet often missed or untreated condition that can result in poor quality of life, a risk of developing heart disease, stroke, diabetes and even cancer, and perhaps most important of all, a threefold increased risk of often-fatal motor vehicle accidents.

Obstructive sleep apnea afflicts about 9 percent of women and 24 percent of men, most of them middle-aged or older, yet as many as 9 in 10 adults with this treatable condition remain undiagnosed, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

The condition is on the rise because the most frequent cause is obesity, which continues its unrelenting climb among American adults. Sleep apnea afflicts more than two people in five who have a body mass index of more than 30, and three in five adults with metabolic syndrome, Dr. Sigrid C. Veasey and Dr. Ilene M. Rosen wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in April.

Read more at the New York Times