Oral health of elite athletes: cause for concern
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- Published: Monday, 18 March 2019 08:48
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Whilst elite athletes appear healthy and free from obvious health issues making them ideal brand ambassadors, high-calorie, low nutritional value foods can cause damage to their teeth and gums. Professor Ian Needleman and Dr Paul Ashley of the Centre for Oral Health and Performance have described their research into athletes’ oral health in a blog in the publication Healthy Stadia.
Good mouth care can easily be forgotten when getting match fit and elite level performance requires high levels of energy, and this often means consuming a lot of high-sugar food and drink.
Concerns about the oral health of athletes have been reported as long ago as the Summer Olympics in 1968. It was suspected that dietary sugars and the acidity of food and drink could be having a negative impact on athletes wellbeing and the London Olympics in 2012 gave the perfect opportunity to look at this in greater detail and recommend strategies to either prevent or mitigate the risk posed by certain food and drink products for elite athletes.
Results from this study confirmed our suspicions and the impact of this research with athletes opened the door to other disciplines including football, rowing, cycling and swimming amongst others, who also had concerns. Needleman and Ashley have now amassed a unique and comprehensive dataset of the oral health of athletes including data from the London Olympics study, their investigation into the oral health of footballers in 2014 and more recently the world’s first comprehensive oral screening of elite level athletes in the UK across a wide range of individual and team sports (Needleman et al., 2017).
Teeth were affected with dental decay and acid erosion. If left untreated this caused pain and even infection which we know stopped athletes performing at the highest level. Inflamed gums were also common, which can lead to early tooth loss but more importantly causes inflammation in the rest of the body; hence the link between gum inflammation and diabetes and cardiac disease.
But perhaps the most significant finding was that a large proportion of athletes felt that their oral health was negatively affecting their performance (32%). One of their PhD students, Julie Gallagher, spent a lot of time with athletes on the training field carrying out this research and commented: ‘It’s easy to see how much pressure there is for young athletes to use sports drinks. In the sports centres and stadia where they train alongside elite groups there are banks of vending machines full of sports drinks. You have to look very hard to find plain water and there is certainly no milk on offer.’
Reference: https://healthystadia.eu/oral-health-of-elite-athletes-cause-for-concern/
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