As someone who is terrified of the dentist (with consequent rare attendance) I found this interesting. Particularly, as I now have to visit one very soon.
In my experience, the Japanese are not prone to hyperbole/exaggeration... also you might prefer to skip the 'treatment' part of the video clip 😬
The purpose of this study is to document the improvement observed in two cases of Parkinson’s disease (PD) after dental treatment. The first subject is a man in his 60s with severe Parkinson’s disease; medication has not been very effective in this case. Prior to treatment, he was unable to stand without support due to rigidity. Just after removing as much of the dental infection as possible, he was able to walk, albeit slowly, and as a result of continuing treatment, one month later, the symptoms had significantly improved. The second subject is a woman in her 40s, who became aware of joint stiffness seven years ago, and was later diagnosed with PD independently at three hospitals. Her main symptoms were rigidity, knee pain, and speech disorder. The dopamine medication worked well against rigidity, but the symptoms reappeared after the medication stopped working. Her condition was significantly improved just after one tooth with an apical lesion was extracted. Although the underlying mechanism has not been clarified, I hypothesize that, at least in these cases, negative signals that passed through the trigeminal nerve to the midbrain affected predominantly the dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra of the midbrain. Removal of the harmful signals from the oral area resulted in normalization of the substantia nigra. Further research should be promoted with dental and medical cooperation
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Seamus6
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It appears that in both cases there were infections that escaped to the outside of the tooth.
"apical lesion" refers to infection at the apex of the root of the tooth. Having an active infection that has escaped the tooth is definitely not a good thing and needs to be treated promptly.
Good dental care is a must especially for people with Parkinson's. Parkinson's can cause a deficiency in saliva which promotes decay.
Hi @seamus6, very interesting. I wonder if they use propofol as the anesthesia in dental surgery in Japan also
Anesthesia for colonoscopy in the USA is also propofol and surprisingly the gastroenterologist I saw a few years ago told me that all of her Parkinson's patients experienced a full remission for several weeks or even months in some cases. I don't think that it was permanent.
Fellow forum member - @ion_ion also reports something similar.
In this study what are you comparing the dentally treated patients to? This IS NOT A STUDY. This is at best wild conjecture. It doesn’t even reach the elementary level of a finding. What is the proposed link of the dental procedures (can you at least qualify what type or level of dental treatment or what procedures resulted in this uncanny result (was it any dental treatment or just root canal procedures?.or could it be that the patient was told the condition was not as serious as they thought=improved. PD? There is very little to NONE in the way of stated facts or data.
In medicine, when you don’t have a clear diagnosis of the patient’s disorder and one begins to throw in possible explanations for what is not known and has no reasonable experimental findings, it is often referred to as, “CHASING ZEBRAS.”
There's no point asking me - I'm not the author! Although, the detail of the dental work undertaken(that you claim is missing) is actually provided in the link.
I don't think the author intends this to be a formal study per sais, but more to document his observations.
I found them interesting and that's why I shared the information. (Most people here are very adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff)
I think that's what people here tend to do, share stuff they find interesting/useful.
I’m interested you see people here adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff. I’m afraid at least among those who post, i see the complete opposite. People led not by science but by emotion.
Don’t want to pour cold water on you guys, but my symptoms actually got a lot worse after a major dental surgery to fix my gum disease. Before the surgery, I didn’t have balance issue and I was working. Right after the surgery, I lost balance, started falling backwards, and became very weak. So I had to stop working. My guess is either the antibiotics killed some gut bacteria, or maybe it caused some stress to the body. Definitely be careful with dental surgery!
From what I have read, falling backwards is a PSP symptom. Again, I am not a doctor and I may be very wrong, but I have read a lot to help my PWP husband.
Oh yes falling backwards definitely is a pd symptom. It also happens to people with PSP - a parkinson plus syndrome. This is just another example of why idiopathic pd can take a while to diagnose.
hi -- i posted on this about a month ago with the same article plus an excellent YouTube video showing the two patients remarkable improvement! I can't find that link right now... If I do, i'll re-post here...
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