…and other items from this week’s health science news:

A combination to smile about

Gum disease (periodontitis) isn’t fun, and can actually be quite a severe health threat. But antibiotics (which, for all their faults, work well against that) are also not fun and can also be quite a severe health threat.

So, what to do?

Researchers (Dr. Nidia Castro dos Santos et al.) did a study amongst people with advanced periodontitis, and found that scaling +3g of omega-3 daily and low-dose aspirin for 6 months produced results comparable to scaling 14 days of metronidazole and amoxicillin. “Scaling” here means “after adjusting for timescales, i.e. taking into account that the antibiotics were taken for a shorter period of time”.

And after one year, 57.7% of the omega-3/aspirin group achieved the target of having no more than four remaining deep periodontal pockets, versus 58% of the antibiotic group and 23.1% of the placebo group.

In other words, in this study, it was a rounding-up shy of being exactly as useful as antibiotics against gum disease.

It’s also worth noting that combining antibiotics with the omega-3/aspirin regimen did not produce better results than either strategy alone, so from these preliminary results at least, it does look like the supplement combination alone could potentially replace antibiotics for this purpose, at least as a first-line treatment (i.e. try the supplement combination, and if that doesn’t work, bring out the heavy guns i.e. the antibiotics).

Reassuringly, improvements remained evident for at least 6 months after omega-3 and aspirin supplementation had stopped, suggesting that modifying the inflammatory response could have effects that outlast the treatment itself, which is also great news too.

That said, it’s still early days and we’d love to see more studies with larger sample sizes, to be sure:

Read in full: Omega-3 plus low-dose aspirin produces antibiotic-like results against severe periodontitis

Related: Why Healthy Teeth May Depend On Omega-3 & Exercise

A pulse oximeter that judges you not by the color of your skin, but by the content of your blood

You would think that would be the baseline requirement of a pulse oximeter, wouldn’t you? But as it turns out, systemic racism is everywhere, including the medical world.

Quick note on what that means: it means that the system has racist biases built into it, even if the people in that system are not themselves racist and nobody is intentionally doing racism. In this case, that pulse oximeters were first developed in the 1940s testing them only on pale skin, caring only whether they worked on pale skin, and now it’s not the 1940s and people are (for the most part) much less overtly racist, the technological hangover still exists (and indeed, science has been very much aware of this pulse oximeter problem since the 1970s, when there was a big redesign, but no improvement in this specific matter).

For example, a 2020 New England Journal of Medicine study (cited in the main article below) found that as many as 17% of Black patients turned out to have hypoxemia despite pulse-oximeter readings having said they were fine, more than 3x the rate observed in white patients.

Dr. Valencia Koomson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has created a device that can do it correctly regardless of skintone, and per the latest studies (again cited in the main article below), all readings were within 2.87% of a reference device, and met FDA performance requirements, with (importantly!) no observable skintone-dependent bias, including at lower oxygen levels:

Read in full: New pulse oximeter adapts to skin color

Related: Heart Health vs Systemic Stress

The other scars of a difficult childhood

Sometimes, childhood leaves scars on us. And not just “from that time you fell off your bike and broke your arm”, but rather the emotional scars, and sometimes, those scars are literally physical changes in our brain.

Researchers (Dr. Meaghan Creed et al.) found that severe stress during childhood can alter how DNA is packaged inside brain cells, increasing vulnerability to anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders later in life.

Specifically, she and her team focused on the ventral tegmental area, a brain region involved in processing rewards and adversity. They found that early-life stress increased levels of the enzyme SETD7 in dopamine neurons, which adds a chemical tag called H3K4me1 to DNA-associated histones. This is important, because DNA is normally tightly wrapped around histone proteins, like a compressed slinky, which makes genes harder to activate, but higher SETD7 levels add H3K4me1 tags that loosen this structure, leaving stress-response genes more accessible, and making dopamine neurons more reactive to environmental stress.

Read in full: How early-life stress leaves a “scar” inside brain cells

Related: Why You Can’t Just “Get Over” Trauma

Take care!