United States: The latest report revealed that people who had an abnormal heart rhythm were the ones who more likely to match up with the healthy heartbeat if they’d taken responsibility to take care of the gum disease.
What has the latest study revealed?
The analysis was performed on atrial fibrillation (A-Fib) patients who had catheter ablation, where heat is applied to destroy a small area of dying heart tissue that’s causing an irregular heartbeat.
Patients with the worst gum inflammation seen among AFib patients that received additional dental care after catheter ablation were approximately 61 percent less likely to have their AFib return than those who did not get any kind of additional dental work.
Dr. Shunsuke Miyauchi, the lead researcher and an assistant professor at the Health Service Center at Hiroshima University in Japan, said, “Proper management of gum disease appears to improve the prognosis of A-Fib, and many people around the world could benefit from it,” as The US News reported.
The study findings were published in the Journal of the American Heart Association on April 10.
More about the findings of the study
A-Fib is associated with a higher risk of stroke (by five times) because clots tend to form in the heart due to changing pulmonary rhythm due to the disease, as emphasized by the researchers.
It is expected that the number of people carrying the A-Fib will exceed the current statistic by more than 12 million in the year of 2030 alone.
In the study, researchers matched 97 heart patients that had got both catheter ablation and the gum treatment to 194 ablation patients without gum disease.
As for the recurrence of A-fib, it was observed to occur at a rate of 24 percent among all participants by the end of the follow-up period, which lasted eight months to 2 years, researchers said.
But patients, who underwent their gums treatment, experienced much less, if any, return of atrial fibrillation, according to the research results.
Furthermore, those patients in which A-Fib came back had extreme gum disease as compared to those whose heart rhythm remained normal after ablation.
Moreover, the researchers expressed “surprised how useful” an analysis of a heart patient’s gum disease could prove helpful in treating the cardiac problems, as Miyauchi said.
The researchers were “surprised how useful” an analysis of a heart patient’s gum disease could be in treating their cardiac problems, Miyauchi said.