New Age Listerine

Oral biologists (who may have no life) tend to specialize in particular areas of the mouth, focusing perhaps on the bacterial communities of the teeth, the crevices between the gums and teeth, or the tongue.

Bruce Paster of the Forsyth Institute has discovered 92 groups of microorganisms that call your tongue home. He and his colleagues found that certain microbes thrive in healthy mouths, but not in mouths with bad breath. Conversely, they identified a half-dozen species of bacteria living exclusively in foul-smelling oral orifices. Their experimental data confirms that the tongue's microbial makeup is an important factor in mouth odor.

A Florida company called Oragenics has developed a mouthwash that replaces pathogenic bacteria with altered germs that will promote oral health. The genetically altered Streptococcus mutans in the new product is unable to produce lactic acid. If this strain successfully replaces the acid-producing strain in the recipients mouth, poof! No more cavities.

The FDA is concerned, however, that if the project goes awry in unexpected ways, there will be no getting rid of mutated S. mutans. For that reason, they are only permitting Oragenics to conduct trials on denture wearers. Ultimately, utilizing the war of the bacterial worlds for our own dental ends may end cavities, gum disease, and bad breath.
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The chips are down on asthma

In the last edition of Femailhealthnews, I mentioned that laughter can precipitate an asthma attack. A recent report indicates that overindulging in chips, pretzels, or other salty foods can also increase the severity of asthma, particularly attacks that are exercise-induced.

Indiana researchers enrolled 24 subjects with known exercise-induced asthma (EIA) and observed their lung function as they ate their way through three salt levels--low, normal, and high--for two weeks at a time. The subjects completed an exercise test during each dietary testing interval. On their usual (normal) salt diet, the amount of air they could blow out in 1 second dropped by 18% at 20 minutes post-workout. In contrast, their function only dropped 8% on a low salt diet but plummeted 27% after two weeks of high salt indulgence.

The investigators also sorted through sputum samples that the participants hacked out after their exercise routine. Compared with their low salt spit, their secretions were loaded with inflammatory white cells and cytokines* during the weeks that they salted their food.

The study authors concluded, "Our findings indicate that dietary salt loading enhances airway inflammation following exercise in asthmatic subjects, and that small salt-dependent changes... might have substantial effects on airway function following exercise."

*cellular products that produce inflammation in response to injury and infection
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The upside of bipolar disorder

Bipolar depression can be devastating, resulting in a markedly decreased ability to participate in any semblance of a normal life. Certain genes are doubtless responsible for the tendency to wild mood swings that characterize this disorder; this is called the genotype. When those genes cause bipolar depression in a susceptible individual under certain physiological and environmental conditions, that is called the phenotype. If the genotype always caused a phenotype that made the individual so ill and disabled that they were unable to successfully reproduce, it would disappear from the human genome.

Peter C. Whybrow, MD of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA was asked what aspects of the bipolar genotype were useful in a way that accounted for its persistence in the human genome. Here is his answer:

I think there is much in the energy and excitement of what one considers hypomania* that codes for excellence, or at least engagement, in day-to-day activities. One of the things that I've learned over the years is that if you find an individual who has severe manic depressive disease, and you look at the family, the family is very often of a higher socioeconomic level than one might anticipate. And again, if you look at a family that is socially successful, you very often find within it persons who have bipolar disease.

So I think that there is a group of genes that codes for the way in which we are able to engage emotionally in life...[E]motion as the vehicle of expression and understanding of other people's expression is what goes wrong in depression and in mania. I think that those particular aspects of our expression are rooted in the same set of genes that codes for what we consider to be pathology in manic-depressive disease. But the interesting part is that if you have, let's say for sake of easy discussion, 5 or 6 genes that code for extra energy (in the dopamine pathway and receptors, and maybe in fundamental cellular activity), you turn out to be a person who sleeps rather little, who has a positive temperament, and so on. If you get another 1 or 2 of them, you end up in the insane asylum.

So I think there is an extraordinary value to those particular genetic pools. So you might say that if you took the bipolar genes out of the human behavioral spectrum, then you would find that probably we would still be -- this is somewhat hyperbolic -- wandering around munching roots and so on.

*Hypomania is the high energy state short of outright mania that can be seen in persons with bipolar tendencies in the course of their normal functioning.
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