Welcome to Running: A FEVER. My name is Michael Davis. This is a podcast about fitness, diet, and medicine. My goal is to live a long, healthy, happy, active life, right up to the very end. I do this by loving my life enough to make it last as long as possible.
It’s the 2nd in our series of 10 episodes about Dental Health. The series explores the why and how of dental issues and then how to take action to correct and prevent them.
This time we’re talking about dry mouth. What causes it? Why is it a problem and not just an uncomfortable condition? What can be done about it?
Let me start by saying I suffer from dry mouth myself. My dentist gave me some ways to mitigate the condition, but I still don’t know what causes it and what I can do to prevent it.
First, let’s look at why dry mouth is a problem. Saliva serves a lot of important functions. It helps digest food. It helps the immune system fight infections in the mouth. And it has some special characteristics that make it very important to maintaining teeth.
After you eat, your mouth can be very acidic. Acid is destructive, even to bones. And your teeth are made of the same materials as your bones. The acid eats away at the minerals in your teeth, and that can cause cavities.
One of saliva’s jobs is to maintain a balanced pH in the mouth. Not too acidic. So, a lack of saliva, in essence, a dry mouth, means more acid and an ideal scenario for the formation of cavities. In fact, saliva can even take those acid-removed minerals and put them back in your teeth.
Okay, all that should convince you that saliva is important. If it were a food, it would be a superfood. So saliva good, dry mouth bad. Now, let’s move on to what causes dry mouth.
One common cause is medication. There are literally thousands of drugs that have dry mouth as a side effect. Some of the categories are antidepressants, decongestants, opioids, benzodiazepine, muscle relaxants, proton-pump inhibitors, antihistamines, antipsychotics, analgesics, Alzheimer’s disease medications, serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SRIs), stimulants, diuretics, beta-blockers, antihypertensives, bronchodilators, anorectic, and tricyclic antidepressants.
Well, that’s a big list! And right now, I can immediately think of six that I take every single day. And if you’re one of the millions of coffee drinkers out there, you have at least two of the above categories going against you. And the more you take, the higher your risk of dry mouth.
Medications aren’t the only cause of dry mouth, however. It might stem from a genetic source. Stress can cause it. Tobacco use also increases the risk. Sleeping with your mouth open or using a CPAP machine are also potential causes. Anti-cancer radiation treatments can damage the saliva glands and cause long-term dry mouth as well.
There are several treatments for dry mouth, including saliva substitutes, pH-balancers, xylitol, and even extra fluoride. I use a high-fluoride toothpaste prescribed and sold by my dentist. Expensive, but necessary. I also use an oral rinse made specifically for dry mouth. Several companies make such products, and I even found a store brand in my local grocery store.
One thing you should definitely not do if you have a dry mouth is to try to treat it using sugary candy or cough drops. The sugar is gobbled up by bacteria in your mouth that produce acid. Instead, I’ve provided a partial list of products below (see the show notes at http://RunningAFEVER.com/371):
CTx2 Spray
Dry Mouth Spray
Mouth Kote
Oasis
Biotene Oral Balance
Biotene Moisturizing Mouth Spray
Rain
Elmex Erosion Protection
Flux Dry Mouth Gel
Flux Mouthwash
Gum Hydral Gel
Gum Hydral Rinse
Gum Hydral Spray
HAp+
Saliva Orthana
Xerodent
Wow, that’s a lot of information. You probably want to go to the website and read the blog over. You can also bookmark it and come back to it for reference if you’re dealing with dry mouth like I am.
I hope you enjoyed this and found it enlightening and informative. I certainly learned some things I didn’t know before. Thanks for listening! And if you have the fever, keep it burning. And if you don’t, what are you waiting for? Catch the fever now! And I’ll talk to you next time on Running: A FEVER.
Reference:
Kutsch, V. Kim. Why Me? The unfair reason you get cavities and what to do about it. Anacortes, Washington: Soapbox Publishing, 2020.
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