A new study in the UK revealed that gum disease may increase the risk of cancer.

Though the link is still unclear, people with gum infections have increased amount of inflammatory markers in the blood — inflammation has previously been linked to cancer.

According to lead researcher Dominique Michaud, a cancer epidemiologist at Imperial College London (UK):

“Men with history of periodontal disease had a 14 percent higher risk of cancer than those who did not have periodontal disease, and the increase persisted among never smokers.

This new finding needs to be examined in other populations and among women, but it at least suggests that oral health may have some impact on cancer risk.

If other data can support this association, then it will have implications for prevention and may provide some new clues on the role of the immune function in cancer development.”

Such findings are reported and published in the June edition of the journal The Lancet Oncology.

Read more details from The Washington Post.

Bumping into this article reminded me of My Top 10 Cancer Beaters.

After all, living and eating healthy all boils down to a strong or robust immune system that lessens our risk of having major diseases and of course, cancer.

Indeed, the link between the increasingly common lifestyle factors, the immune system and cancer, with the ultimate goals of preventing and better understanding cancer development are the issues under dissection at the American Association for Cancer Research’s Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research meeting.

Like the gum disease-prostate cancer link. Harvard School of Public Health’s epidemiologists were able to show that diseased gums increase the risk of pancreatic cancer.

To confirm the initial findings, together with colleagues from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the University of Puerto Rico are now looking how and whether inflammation (specifically, systemic inflammation from periodontal disease) might be related to pancreatic cancer.

Another one is diet-induced obesity that wrecks the immune system of patients receiving cancer vaccine and that a man’s prediagnostic BMI (body mass index) pretty much determines his chances of surviving lethal prostate cancer.

So I guess we are all being reminded to eat healthy and take care of our gums and teeth. Let’s all watch what we eat: let’s eat healthy, be merry and never forget to brush out teeth. (I wanted that to rhyme, but i guess it didn’t…oh, well.)

Read the full report at AACR.