Orofacial Signs Linked to Lyme Disease

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An interesting article titled “Orofacial Manifestations of Lyme Disease: A systematic review” appears in the The Journal of Dental Hygiene written by Brenda T. Bradshaw and et al. (vol. 95, no. 4, August 2021). The article seeks to perform a systematic review of the types and frequencies of orofacial manifestations of people in the the United States with Lyme disease. In the article the authors performed their systematic review by starting from 217,381 articles that had been searched by a university librarian. The authors weeded these results down substantially due to duplication and to meet their exclusion criteria that included if not with US populations, if not available in English in full text, and if does not have a CDC diagnosis of Lyme disease. This resulted in twelve articles for the analysis with seven from the 1990s, three from the … Read more

Visualization of Facial Pain Sensory Signaling

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An interesting article titled “Visualization of trigeminal ganglion sensory neuronal signaling regulated by Cdk5,” written by M. Hu and et al. appears in the 2022 editon of Cell Reports (Mar 8, vol. 38, no. 10, pp. 110458). The article seeks to explore some of the mechanisms underlying facial pain and used intravital imaging to compare trigeminal neuronal activities after mechanical, thermal, and chemical stimulation. The work was carried out by researchers for the NIH’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. Orofacial pain that occurs in the oral and facial region affects 5% to 12% of the U.S. population. This pain can affect daily activities and causes many to seek medications like opioids for releif, but opioids can be addicting. Thus researchers are interested in learning more about how facial nerves process pain signals to help lead to more efficeitn … Read more

Using Artificial Intelligence to Detect Gum Inflammation

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An interesting article titled “Accuracy of Artificial Intelligence-Based Photographic Detection of Gingivitis” appears in the International Dental Journal written by Reinhard Chun Wang Chau and et.al., 2023. The article used artificial intelligence (AI) to provide automated visual plaque control advice based on intraoral photographs. Periodontal disease is a chronic inflammatory disease that is categorised into gingivitis and periodontitis with reversible and irreversible tissue damages. It is beleived to affect mroe than 50% of the world. Periodontal disease is caused by accumulation of plaque biofilm along the gingival margin, which causes local gingival inflammation. As inflammation occurs at the gingival margin, redness, swelling, and loss of stippling appearance as loss of gingival fiber attachment are observed which are changes detected visually by dentists. The study used a deep learning algorithm named DeepLabv3+ built on Keras with TensorFlow to analyze intraoral photographs … Read more

Man with infected wisdom tooth dies several weeks later

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In early 2021, a man 44 years of age living in Auckland in New Zealand, died a few weeks after being aware of having an infected wisdom tooth. He first complained of having pain in his lower right wisdom tooth on Christmas Eve in 2020. He went to see a doctor about it several times over many days for swelling and pain and was given antibiotics. He was unable to swallow the pills so was given liquid antibiotics instead but nothing seemed to help with the infection. Later the pain and swelling in his face and neck became progressively worse. He went to the hospital on January 4, 2021. While in the hospital he had x-rays taken and was later discharged. The family was shocked to hear that the man was able to get discharged that soon. He was sent … Read more

Periodontal Disease associated with heart attacks

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In the past on this site links between periodontal disease and cardiovascular disease have been mentioned, see for example the posts Additional link between cardiovascular and periodontal disease and Periodontal Disease and Cardiovascular Risk. Periodontal disease is also known as gum disease. Recently, a study appearing in the Journal of the American Dental Association titled “Association between periodontal care and hospitalization with acute myocardial infarction” written by Romesh P. Nalliah and et. al. (April 19, 2022) has shown that those with periodontal disease are at increased risk of ending up in the hospital due to a heart attack. In the study researchers explored periodontal care and heart attack-related hospitalizations and aftercare by analyzing Iinsurance claims data from MarketScan Research Databases, which includes information from hundreds of millions of patients in the U.S. Patients were included if they had been hospitalized in … Read more