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Unlikely as it may sound, there's more to brushing your teeth than just avoiding tooth decay and gum disease.New research suggests that keeping your teeth clean could be keeping your mind keen and can help to reduce your risk of dementia.
Scientists at Columbia University in New York tested more than 2,300 men and women for bugs that cause periodontitis, the disease that leaves gums receding and teeth becoming loose.
The volunteers, all over the age of 60, also performed memory tests.
And bizarre as it sounds, those with bad dental health were the lowest scorers. In fact those with the highest levels of gum disease bugs were three times as likely to have difficulty recalling a three-word sequence as those with good gums.
They were also found to be twice as likely to fail on the mental arithmetic based memory test.
Though it is unclear how your shiny white teeth can help to protect against Alzheimer's, but those pesky bugs that lurk in our gums are known to damage arteries, which is in turn linked to dementia.
But British experts say that while the US study was interesting, it proved nothing. Instead, it could be that people brush their teeth less as their memory starts to fail.
