No, we don’t know that gum disease causes Alzheimer’s
A new study suggests a link between oral bacteria and Alzheimer’s, but it’s far from proven
Do you floss regularly? A study published January 23 in Science Advances — and the news stories that it inspired — might have scared you into better oral hygiene by claiming to find a link between gum bacteria and Alzheimer’s disease.
Those experiments hinted that the gum disease–causing bacteria Porphyromonas gingivalis was present in the brains of a small number of people who died with the degenerative brain disease. Some headlines trumpeted that the cause of Alzheimer’s had finally been found.