Posted by DaveZale 12 hours ago
- Does this suggest that courses of antibiotics might reduce heart attack risk?
- Does this suggest that regular use of, e.g., Listerine might reduce heart attack risk? (While, perhaps, slightly increasing esophageal cancer risk.)
It would be interesting to run an epidemiological study to see if current interventions move the needle in a meaningful way.
Don't use "antiseptic" mouthwash; it kills beneficial bacteria in the mouth, causing bad bacteria to multiply.
I have personal experience of this.
Maybe you’re thinking toothpastes? SLS in toothpaste is indeed hard to avoid.
eg. https://www.science.org/content/article/antibiotics-cut-hear...
The disease is only the named group of symptoms. The potential cause of the disease is the bacterial infection. Those are very different concepts.
I think I'll go floss.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa043526
still hasn't really panned out
How does flu affect the heart? The virus only rarely infects the heart directly. Instead, the adverse effects of the virus on the heart are due to atherosclerosis of the arteries of the heart. Many people over age 50 have atherosclerosis — and in some people it has not yet been diagnosed. Because atherosclerosis narrows the arteries and reduces the flow of blood, less oxygen reaches the heart muscle. When the effect of the flu on the lungs lowers the amount of oxygen in the blood, this further reduces the supply of oxygen to the heart. This can lead to a heart attack or cardiac arrest (sudden death).
Is this risk more than theoretical? Many careful studies have shown there is an increased risk of heart disease following a bout of flu. In one study of 80,000 adults with influenza, nearly 12% had a serious cardiac event, such as a heart attack, during or in the weeks after getting the flu.
That sounds really high
Okay I just looked it up and this was only among hospitalized individuals which makes a lot more sense because most people just stay home unless it's very bad but that is still surprising to me
Even temporary stress on the respiratory system can cause long-term damage to the brain, lungs, and heart. Because of Covid, we started to learn that an acute, severe infection can affect people much later.
That research led to the beginning of an understanding that repeated flu infections can contribute to premature death even many decades later.