🦷 Mondays with Mark (NEW STUDY)

Hope you all had a restful long weekend. Sharing a new study with you all that I hope you find as thought provoking as I did:

Association between sleep duration and dental caries in a nationally representative U.S. population (July 2023)

This study reinforces my belief that sleep is the root cause of many of our modern ailments.

The study found that people sleeping fewer than seven hours each night had more cavities.

If you don’t sleep well, bad things happen. No surprise there. But we rarely associate poor sleep with cavities! Even rarer do we consider cavities to be a serious metabolic disease, which they are.

So, what could the mechanism be for this? Maybe it’s a lack of the hormones that regulate appetite (I touch on this in my book The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox). Another proposed mechanism comes from this study which found higher BMIs associated with higher levels of S. mutans. Insufficient sleep could reduce salivary flow—although, the study fails to mention mouth breathing.

Individuals who experience circadian misalignment have a higher fasting blood glucose level (shift workers). This has already been positively correlated with an increase in decayed, missing, or filled teeth (DMFT). Another mechanism could be that a disrupted circadian rhythm could lead to a disrupted immune response. The health of the oral microbiome is based on the host’s ability to mediate its immune response.

So, let’s say you’re someone who gets fewer than seven hours of sleep every night. Maybe you’re a mom who’s up with the kids. Maybe you’re a shift worker. Mouth taping could potentially ameliorate some of these effects!

People with a high DMFT score (more than ten teeth that are decayed, missing, or filled) had considerably lower levels of melatonin in their saliva. Melatonin is not just about regulating sleep—melatonin has the ability to counter oxidative stress that is induced during the onset and progression of dental cavities.

Think of it this way: if you’re low melatonin, you’re kind of defenseless—think of melatonin as part of your immune system!

Another example of the importance of working with a functional dentist who can bring all of this together for you! Dentists are better trained in why we sleep poorly, how it happens (facial development), breathing as it affects decay, and the root causes for decay. Physicians can’t do this, but dentists can and should.

Dental practitioners reading this—if you’re filling cavities all day long and not talking to your patients about their sleep, whaddaya doing?!

This study confirms yet another reason for dentists to be dealing with sleep—it’s a major contributor to the #1 disease in the world: dental cavities.

Have a great week,

P.S. Check out my top five things I won’t go to bed without.