Take Care of Your Teeth and Prevent Arthritis

Oral health is like a window to your overall health, and this study proves that your oral health can even help in detecting arthritis. Traces of bacteria that are commonly associated with periodontal diseases have also been seen in samples from patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

When Rice University computational biologist Vicky Yao found traces of this particular bacteria that is associated with periodontal disease in the samples that were collected from rheumatoid arthritis patients, it was evident that there is an unestablished link that needs to be explored. Her findings have sparked a series of experiments that confirm an unexplored connection between arthritis flare-ups and periodontitis (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Oral mucosal breaks trigger anti-citrullinated bacterial and human protein antibody responses in rheumatoid arthritis

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Tracing this connection between the two conditions could aid in developing therapies for rheumatoid arthritis, which is described as an autoimmune inflammatory disease that tends to attack the lining of the joint and can also cause heart, lung, and eye problems.

The approach that led to the study could also pave a fruitful pathway for finding treatment modalities for diseases, including cancer.

"Data gathered in experiments from living organisms, cells, or tissue grown in Petri dishes is really important to confirm hypotheses, but, at the same time, this data perhaps holds more information than we are immediately able to derive from it," Yao said.

Yao’s hunch was confirmed when she took a deeper look into the data that she collected from rheumatoid arthritis patients.

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"Orange, working with Darnell, collected data from arthritis patients at regular intervals while, at the same time, monitoring when the flares happened," Yao said. "The idea was that perhaps by looking at this data retroactively, some pattern would become visible, giving clues as to what might cause arthritis to flare up.

"While I was working on that project, I went to this talk that I thought was cool because it pointed out that in the data that gets ignored or thrown out, you can find traces of microbes. You’re looking at a human sample, but you get a snapshot of the microbes floating around. I was intrigued by this."

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When she looked into the data that was collected, she observed that the germs in the samples that consistently changed across patients before flares were largely the ones that were associated with gum disease.

"I was curious about this tool that allowed you to detect microbes in human samples. It was sort of like, for free, you’re getting an extra perspective on the data," Yao said. "At the time, I hadn’t worked much on microbial data at all. Since then, Dana has leveraged all this expertise and gotten together with people studying these bacteria.

"One of the things that came up when we were discussing this was, how cool would it be if you could prescribe some kind of mouthwash to help prevent rheumatoid arthritis flares."

"I got interested in what else we can find by mining for microbial signatures in human samples," Yao said. "Now, we’re doing something similar in looking at cancer.

"The hope here is that if we find some interesting microbial or viral signatures that are associated with cancer, we can then identify productive experimental directions to pursue. For instance, if having a tumor creates this hotbed of specific microbes that we recognize, then we can maybe use that knowledge as a means to diagnose cancer sooner or in a less invasive or costly way. Or, if you have microbes that have a very strong association with survival rates, that can help with the prognosis. And if experiments confirm a causal link between a specific virus or bacteria and a type of cancer, then, of course, that could be useful for therapeutics."

One of the better-known pathogens that had a similar discovery and was later associated with cancer is human papillomavirus (HPV), and this study falls along similar lines to the HPV discovery.

"When we did the same exercise looking at cervical cancer tumor samples, we consistently detected the virus," she said. "It’s a nice proof-of-principle finding that shows that the presence of specific pathogens can be meaningful for certain types of cancer. "I’m interested in using computational approaches to bridge the gap between available experimental data and ways to interpret it. Computational analysis is a way to help interpret data and prioritize hypotheses for clinicians or experimental scientists to test."

Reference :

1. Oral mucosal breaks trigger anti-citrullinated bacterial and human protein antibody responses in rheumatoid arthritis - (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.abq8476)

Source-Medindia