Dental Work Causes Stroke

An alarmist title???

Yeah probably, but Larry quite unexpectedly suffered a stroke last month just 3 weeks after extensive dental work. Coincidence? I doubt it. A word of precaution from his dentist might have saved us a lot of suffering. So might some antibiotics or a recommendation to take aspirin or some other anti inflammatory. We went in to the dentist  thinking that the only consequence would be a fairly large dent in our bank account but one of the first questions the doctors asked us in the emergency room after his stroke was had he had any dental work done recently. That red flag has been meandering around the back of my brain ever since...

The investigators discovered that there was a significantly increased heart attack or stroke risk during the month following their dental work (incidence ratio 1.50; 95% CI 1.09-2.06)....The risk was found to gradually subside to baseline (normal) after about six months.

More than half of the heart attack and strokes seen in the study occurred in women, and 30% in people who were younger than 50, the study showed.