HYGIENE TRIBUNE The World’s Dental Hygiene Newspaper · U.S. Edition MAY 2020 — Vol. 13, No. 1 www.dental-tribune.com Virtual ADHA Annual meeting will take place online from June 26 to 28 By Dental Tribune Staff The annual American Dental Hygien- ists’ Association conference — which is billed as “The largest, most comprehen- sive and cost-effective event for dental hygienists in the nation” — is going vir- tual this year. The meeting, originally scheduled to take place in New Orleans, will run from Friday, June 26 to Sunday, June 28. “Due to the enduring impact of COV- ID-19, ADHA has made the very difficult decision to cancel our in-person annual conference,” the organization said in a post to its Facebook page on April 25. “We were really looking forward to seeing you in New Orleans; however, the health and safety of our community must come first. So, we’re going virtual! Although we can’t be together in person, we can unite from the comfort of home for the first-ever ADHA Virtual Conference.” Up to 21 C.E. credits will be available during the weekend, and topics include oral cancer assessment, HPV, dental sealants, varnish solutions, mobile den- tistry, orofacial myofunctional therapy, implant therapy and depression in staff and patients, among others. Of particular interest will be “A Con- versation with the ADHA Task Force on Return to Work” at 2:45 p.m. Central Time on Saturday as well as a “COVID-19: Your Questions Answered” roundtable at 4 p.m. Central Time on Saturday. For more information, for a complete schedule and to register for the event, head to to www.adha2020.org. Attendees head into the 2019 ADHA annual meeting in Louisville, Ky. This year, the ADHA meeting is going virtual. Photo/Dental Tribune file photo Citizen science: Flossing and dental visits correlate to healthier mouths Most people know that good oral hy- giene — brushing, flossing and regular dental visits — is linked to good health. Colorado State University microbiome researchers offer fresh evidence to sup- port that conventional wisdom by taking a close look at invisible communities of microbes that live in every mouth. The oral microbiome — the sum total of microorganisms, including bacte- ria and fungi, that occupy the human mouth — was the subject of a crowd- sourced, citizen science-driven study by Jessica Metcalf’s research lab at CSU and Nicole Garneau’s research team at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Published in Scientific Reports, the study found, among other things, a correlation between people who did not visit the dentist regularly and increased presence of a pathogen that causes periodontal disease. For the experiments, carried out by Garneau’s community science team in the Genetics of Taste Lab at the museum, a wide cross-section of museum visi- tors submitted to a cheek swab and an- swered simple questions about their de- mographics, lifestyles and health habits. Microbial DNA sequencing data analyzed by Metcalf’s group revealed, broadly, that oral health habits affect the communi- ties of bacteria in the mouth. The study underscored the need to think about oral health as strongly linked to the health of the entire body. Cheek swabs Back in 2015, paper-co-author Garneau — who earned her Ph.D from CSU — and her team trained volunteer citizen scientists to use large swabs to collect cheek cells from museum visitors — a naturally diverse population — who con- sented to the study. These trained citizen scientists helped collect swabs from 366 individuals — 181 adults and 185 youth aged 8 to 17. The original impetus was to determine whether and to what extent the oral microbiome contributes to how people taste sweet things. In collecting this data, which was also reported in the paper, the researchers noted more significant data points around oral health habits. Flossing and regular dental care The study grouped people who flossed or didn’t floss (almost everyone said they brushed, so that wasn’t a useful data point). Participants who flossed were found to have lower microbial diversity in their mouths than non-flossers. This is most likely because of the physical re- moval of bacteria that could be causing inflammation or disease. Adults who had gone to a dentist in the last three months had lower overall microbial diversity in their mouths than those who hadn’t gone in 12 months or longer and had less of the periodontal disease-causing oral pathogen, Trepone- ma. This, again, was probably because of dental cleaning removing rarer bacterial taxa in the mouth. Youth tended to have had a dental visit more recently than adults. Youth microbiomes differed among males and females and by weight. Chil- dren considered obese according to their body mass indices had distinct micro- biomes as compared to non-obese chil- dren. The obese children also tended to have higher levels of Treponema, reveal- ing a possible link between childhood obesity and periodontal disease. Results also saw that people who lived in the same household shared similar oral microbiomes. The study was made possible by a Sci- ence Education Partnership Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health (Award #R250D021909). (Source: Colorado State University)