4 minute read
SPOILER ALERT: ORAL HEALTH AND HEART HEALTH ARE CONNECTED
from PDS Life Summer 2022
by PDS Health
How the Mouth-Body Connection ® is gaining traction beyond PDS-supported clinicians and into the freshman class of a California high school.
When 14-year-old Kavya Kadakia, a freshman at Centennial High School in Southern California, began brainstorming ideas for her science fair project, she wasn’t sure where to begin. She began looking through her parents’ bookshelves and stumbled on “Beat the Heart Attack Gene” by Bradley Bale, MD, and Amy Doneed, ARNP, a book that highlights the link between periodontal disease and cardiovascular disease. Intrigued, she realized the best source for information about the Mouth-Body Connection lived under her own roof.
Kavya’s mother, Smita Kadakia, DDS, is the owner dentist and primary clinician at office 73, South Corona Dental Group. The apple, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree.
This project played a huge role in my admiration of medicine and my new passion for the connection between dentistry and medicine.
Kavya Kadakia focused her science fair project on the Mouth-Body Connection.
“We really familiarized Kavya with the basics to prepare her for this project,” Dr. Kadakia said. “Her dad and I provided her with some old dental school textbooks and educated her about the consequences of chronic inflammation and its role in systemic diseases. She put in the rest of the work herself.”
Kavya’s project, Scout Your Mouth, Your Heart Will Get Smart, began to take shape and she decided the focus would be the Mouth- Body Connection. With guidance and supervision, she used salivary diagnostic tests on a control group without any known cardiovascular issues and an experimental group with prevalent cardiovascular disease (CVD) or some form of coronary artery disease (CAD), sent the kits to OralDNA ® Labs for analysis and wrote a report on the results.
To her surprise, Kavya learned some participants shared the same levels of oral bacteria regardless of their age. She also came across a challenge many clinicians face: patient honesty.
“It was a challenge gathering honest answers from participants,” she said. “You can’t rely on everyone to tell the truth, so I had to ask very generic questions that required simple answers, such as ‘how often do you brush your teeth?’”
While this experience gave her a taste of what health care providers encounter, she enjoyed learning about the link between periodontal disease and chronic diseases. She also discovered that salivary diagnostics are an important tool for improving and diagnosing patients’ overall health. “Salivary diagnostics is revolutionary and if utilized properly, has so much potential. It’s like a security system for your body.”
Dr. Kadakia acknowledges her daughter has always had an affinity for medical and health sciences, especially since she comes from a family of dental and medical professionals.
She aims to raise awareness about the oral-systemic link and intends to expand upon this project over the next three years segueing the project into her senior thesis. Kavya’s project was recently featured on the OralDNA Labs website, Oral Systemic Links Through the Eyes of Gen Z.
“I’m so proud of Kavya. This project has sparked her interest in medical and health sciences, and it may have triggered her calling,” said Dr. Kadakia. “I’m inspired by her, not just as her mom, but as a dentist in my career.”
