[HN Gopher] Oral Microbes Linked to 3-Fold Increased Risk of Pan...
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Oral Microbes Linked to 3-Fold Increased Risk of Pancreatic Cancer
Author : bmau5
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-09-26 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nyulangone.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (nyulangone.org)
| johnea wrote:
| To me the title of this article, and several points contained
| within, where overly broad.
|
| They give the impression that _having_ microbes in your mouth and
| on your skin is a cancer risk, which is most definitely not the
| case.
|
| The connection between the microbiome and cancer and heart
| disease is coming more to light. And the articles point that
| certain microbes may contribute to cancer risk sounds like
| another significant new finding.
|
| But having a sterile environment in the mouth or on the skin is
| certainly detrimental to health.
|
| Like the gut microbiome, it's the content that counts, not
| whether to have one or not...
| ortusdux wrote:
| The wording seems causational, while the data indicates a
| correlation.
|
| "Altogether, the entire group of microbes boosted participants'
| chances of developing the cancer by more than threefold."
|
| I feel like you would need a study that observes the effect of
| introducing or remove these microbes from a population before
| you can draw this conclusion.
| blindriver wrote:
| > But having a sterile environment in the mouth or on the skin
| is certainly detrimental to health.
|
| Can you point to a study that suggests this? I have no opinion
| one way or another but making statements like this without any
| backing is misinformation.
| dham wrote:
| Just like the gut you have to have the right bacteria. Not
| none. This is a study on Psoriasis which is caused by
| systematic inflamation.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9076720/
| ebolyen wrote:
| It is the initial purpose of a microbiome to be at least
| commensal, in that it is usually prohibitively expensive to
| maintain a sterile environment so the odds of a true pathogen
| colonizing a system is greatly reduced if you simply have a
| crowded space of neutral participants.
|
| Once that's true it does seem there's a lot of host and
| microbiome interactions we've only begun to explore, but it
| shouldn't be surprising that co-evolution of the microbiome
| and host begins to take over as soon as you have one. One
| great example is short-chain-fatty-acid (SCFA) producing
| bacteria in the human gut. [1] These seem to be essential,
| and if there was a general takeaway to improve health, it
| would be to eat your roughage so they can do their job.
|
| This is also why high alpha-diversity (community richness in
| particular) is such a dead-ringer for healthy vs diseased
| states. And frustratingly, is often exactly where the story
| ends for a lot of observational studies.
|
| Also, in case you are curious, artificially sterile mice
| (gnotobiotic mice) tend to act differently than other mice,
| which is pretty odd to be honest, and why the gut-brain axis
| is a plausible mechanism to research further. [2]
|
| [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180739/ [2]:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915912.
| ..
| panabee wrote:
| The association between pathogens and cancer is under-
| appreciated, mostly due to limitations in detection methods.
|
| For instance, it is not uncommon for cancer studies to design
| assays around non-oncogenic strains, or for assays to use primer
| sequences with binding sites mismatched to a large number of NCBI
| GenBank genomes.
|
| Another example: studies relying on The Cancer Genome Atlas
| (TCGA), which is a rich database for cancer investigations.
| However, the TCGA made a deliberate tradeoff to standardize
| quantification of eukaryotic coding transcripts but at the cost
| of excluding non-poly(A) transcripts like EBER1/2 and other viral
| non-coding RNAs -- thus potentially understating viral presence.
|
| Enjoy the rabbit hole. :)
| pessimizer wrote:
| The real question always is: assuming causation, if you
| drastically improve the oral health of 1000 people, how many
| would you save from pancreatic cancer? The answer to this
| question in associative studies is very often in the single
| figures, or lower (i.e. fractions of people.)
|
| Anything to create an excuse to provide better dental care for
| people, though. The chance of getting a gum infection that
| spreads to your brain and/or goes septic is actually quite high.
| layer8 wrote:
| 1) I find numbers like "3-fold increased risk" a bit meaningless
| without knowing the baseline risk.
|
| 2) Here is an audio interview with one of the authors of the
| study: https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/audio-
| player/19004027
| dham wrote:
| I've been saying what we actually need is universal dental care
| vs universal health care for over 15 years. Giving out universal
| health care without dental care is like changing the oil in a car
| but failing to see the tires aren't even on.
|
| I heard horror stories from my mom who worked in a periodontist
| office (as receptionist) growing up. Really got me to care about
| oral health early on. Health really starts at the mouth. If you
| don't have a healthy mouth you'll never have a healthy body.
| donperignon wrote:
| Or maybe a compromised inmune system is what allow candida to
| flourish...
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