Dr. Bob's Mouthly Report

A new study links the benefits of comprehensive oral care to the physical and emotional recovery of patients seeking treatment for substance use disorder.

Your smile, and associated oral health, may be a factor for successfully passing through the revolving doors of life. It is your first impression to a stranger, the closing argument to land a job and a major factor to achieving a good quality of life. For those who struggle with substance use disorder, oral health often falls off the precipice of self-care thereby seriously damaging interpersonal skills, while causing poor nutrition, increased oral and general infections and debilitating oral pain.

Read more at ScienceDaily

A new study links the benefits of comprehensive oral care to the physical and emotional recovery of patients seeking treatment for substance use disorder.

Your smile, and associated oral health, may be a factor for successfully passing through the revolving doors of life. It is your first impression to a stranger, the closing argument to land a job and a major factor to achieving a good quality of life. For those who struggle with substance use disorder, oral health often falls off the precipice of self-care thereby seriously damaging interpersonal skills, while causing poor nutrition, increased oral and general infections and debilitating oral pain.

Read more at ScienceDaily

The goal, backed by some research, is to improve health and reduce costs by subsidizing fresh produce such as broccoli and grapefruit in addition to insulin and beta blockers.

“What we are hoping to find is there is a return on investment for the health-care system: a reduction in ER visits, medication compliance,” said Lauren Shweder Biel, executive director of DC Greens, a nonprofit group that is managing the District’s Produce Rx pilot. “That’s the holy grail for systems like this.”

Improved diet is also a target.

“I was trying to manage my patients’ diabetes and high blood pressure, but when they were telling me they were eating Top Ramen, doughnuts and bagels because it keeps them full, all I could say was ‘That’s too bad, here’s some more drugs,’?” said Rita Nguyen of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, who now oversees an expanding produce prescription program at six clinics.

Read more at the Washington Post

Your diet may have more impact on your cancer risk than you might think, a new study has found.

An estimated 80,110 new cancer cases among adults 20 and older in the United States in 2015 were attributable simply to eating a poor diet, according to the study, published in the JNCI Cancer Spectrum on Wednesday.

The researchers evaluated seven dietary factors: a low intake of vegetables, fruits, whole grains and dairy products and a high intake of processed meats, red meats and sugary beverages, such as soda.

"Low whole-grain consumption was associated with the largest cancer burden in the US, followed by low dairy intake, high processed-meat intake, low vegetable and fruit intake, high red-meat intake and high intake of sugar-sweetened beverages," Zhang said.

Read more at CNN

"I'm not so much worried about dying from a heart attack or diabetes, because I'm active. I know what to do to work against it: watch what I eat, exercise," Evans says. "But what do I do about an infection? Or fighting off a bacteria — something inside me that I don't see until it's too late?"

"My fear is that as we are in this arms race, there gets to the point where we are not able to keep up with the enemy — the resistant bacteria. The superbugs take over, and we have nothing to defend against it," Priebe says.

So Priebe enlisted Evans to help develop a different way to fight superbugs. It's a new kind of antibiotic made out of viruses that have been genetically modified using the gene-editing tool CRISPR.

"What CRISPR is able to do is something that we've not been able to do before. And that is, very selectively modify genes in the viruses to target the bacteria," Priebe says.

Later this year, Dr. Michael Priebe and his colleagues plan to start infusing cocktails containing billions of bacteriophages genetically modified with CRISPR into patients at six centers around the United States.

Rob Stein/NPR

"If we're successful, this revolutionizes the treatment of infections," he adds. "This can be the game changer that takes us out of this arms race with the resistant bacteria and allows us to use a totally different mechanism to fight the pathogenic bacteria that are infecting us."

Read more at NPR