Physical exercise is good for the health. Health experts, in fact, recommend that people be physically active as this can help reduce their risks for certain health conditions including obesity and type 2 diabetes.
It appears, however, that too much of everything even in terms of exercise, is not good. Findings of a new study have found the heavy training may have unwanted consequences to a person's teeth. Researchers from Germany found evidence that heavy training among athletes is associated with poor dental health.
For the new study published in The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, Cornelia Frese, a dentist from the University Hospital Heidelberg in Germany, and colleagues wanted to assess the effects of endurance training on oral health so they evaluated the oral health and saliva of 35 triathletes, who are known to work out more often and train for longer hours compared with most people, and 35 non-athletes.
The researchers found that the athletes in the study exhibited more signs of tooth decay than their non-athlete counterparts and while the researchers did not find significant difference in the prevalence of cavity in the two groups, the athletes who spent more training hours tend to have cavities than the athletes who spent fewer hours training.
Frese and colleagues also examined the participants' saliva, which contains enzymes and other substances that help protect the teeth and gums, and found that there were no significant difference in the subjects' saliva in terms of chemical makeup and volume when they are at rest but when the athletes started to work out, the researchers noticed that the production of their saliva is reduced and the acidity of their spit changes, which could lead to tooth decay.
"In athletes after incremental running field test (IRFT) and at maximum workload, saliva flow rates decreased and saliva pH increased significantly," the researchers wrote. "Higher risk for dental erosions, exercise-dependent caries risk, and load-dependent changes in saliva parameters point out the need for risk-adapted preventive dental concepts in the field of sports dentistry."
The findings of the study should not discourage people from exercising though because as Frese has pointed out, the study was short-term and involved only a few subjects who have different levels of physical activities.
"The athletes participating in our study had a mean weekly training time of nine hours," Frese said. "All we can say is that prolonged endurance training might be a risk factor for oral health."
