Quercetin & Gum Disease: Don’t Query It

Sometimes, we just wish things would hurry up, don’t we?

‘Sometimes’ isn’t even the clarifier anymore; we have undoubtedly created a culture of immediacy that essentially doesn’t serve us very well. It’s what has us eat fast food far, far too frequently (and fast), text rather than call (or god help us, call in), and believe in lipo, GLP-1 agonists and agomelatine.

Change and healing take time. Time takes time, and we just don’t have time for that.

Forget having the patience to read a book; we don’t even have the patience to watch a series until we can binge it. With pizza delivery on speed dial.

We habitually conflate urgency and impatience. Maybe because urgency is a virtue, impatience is not; and we’re primed to see ourselves in a positive light all the time now. We’re addicted to presenting a false narrative about who we are, what we do, what we buy. Almost everything. Unless it’s matchless – which it rarely is. Hence the hype, the hubris, and the hagiographic hyperbole that fuels the zeitgeist engine.

It’s oily. It needs a filter that’s not an AR, beauty or content one. We need clarity, not Clarendon.

There are people who claim that this restlessness of being unwilling to wait is an attribute of the adventurous and the bold. It’s not.

Think Stockton Rush – an aptronym if ever there was. Impatience creates perpetual disappointment, stress, and rationalises corner-cutting in order to beat the clock and produce sub-par results. It’s an assertion that equates bullshit with ballast: that having a desk job is superior to having a trade; education is the key to success; and that ageing is a no-win game to be avoided at all cost.

Literally. And ludicrously.

Just check out what Braintree brain-stormer, burgeoning biohacker Bryan Johnson is up to. In order to have something self-obsessive to do with hundreds of millions of dollars, he’s decided to strive for immortality. He scores and optimises every facet of his life except for lovin’ the living of it. He scarfs down 111 pills a day, wears a cap that shoots red light into his scalp and checks out his turds like a 1950s ad man poring over DDB’s Volkswagen campaign. Vampiric of complexion, avoiding sunlight and steaks (heh); mucking around with infusing family blood into his system and without much humanness on display, maybe he has cracked the crackpot jackpot. If that’s living, he can have it. Cocaine used to be God’s way of telling you you have too much money – now, with all the centillionaires blowing around the globe, maybe the hands of the holy have been thrown in the air with, “Whatever, dudes … go for broke!”

Clearly ignoring the fact that he does have dental veneers, Johnson asserts that he doesn’t “really care what people in our time and place think of me. I really care about what the 25th century thinks.”

Okaaaaay. That’s 400 years from now, Mr Impatience. Referring to it in the present tense doesn’t make it present. It’s still 146,000 revolutions of the sun away, and if he can make that happen faster maybe God has something to contend with; a contender. If, in fact, a supreme being is in charge of all that stuff.

Here in Sunbury, we’re not particularly in a hurry to find out. Nor are we especially tempted to align with Johnson’s idea that the human experience is little more than a biochemical state of electrical impulses and hormones.

Admittedly, there’s a tantalising doomsday flirtation with Johnson’s proposal that we’re “walking into a future where we no longer have control” (assuming, of course that we’ve ever actually had it). It segues, “we’re willing to divorce ourselves from all human custom. Everything: all philosophy, all ethics, all moral, all happiness” which jolts the figurative me having that conversation with him into gazing middle-distance over the top of his head, and ordering another drink. Maybe a double; definitely on his tab.

Although there’s not much irony in the anaemia he appears to be suffering, there is delicious irony in impatiently waiting to live forever.

From all accounts it’s the only delicious thing, with nothing but mushy blends to eat and anything not deemed ‘life-extending’ deigned “an act of violence.” From at least a couple of obvious perspectives, one can reasonably figure that having sex is a life-extending activity, yet there seems to be none of that from the world’s most micro-managed measured man. Such is the life of someone who vehemently believes that death is optional, and plans never to do it.

Never say never, as they say …

Quercetin is one of the natural senolytics included in Johnson’s joyless diet. It’s a polyphenol found in many foods: capers, apples and red onions are rated as having the highest content. Buckwheat, almonds, pistachios, berries, tomatoes, black and green teas contain it; as does dark chocolate. Beer, wine and champagne also contain quercetin, in case a bit of non-joi de vivre was creepily creeping in.

What has recently excited dental researchers is a translational study by a team at Penn Dental Medicine focused on quercetin. With periodontal disease being the inflammatory result of a deregulated immune response to oral bacteria, anti-senescence therapy (senotherapy) based on quercetin reduced gum damage and bone loss in laboratory and animal models.

Along with an enzyme inhibitor known as dasatinib, keratinocytes (gum cells) were exposed to anaerobes associated with the disease. This gave the senescence-like molecular signature. Treatment with the dasatinib-quercetin (DQ) combination significantly diminished this marker. Comparably, quercetin alone also reduced this lab created characteristic pattern.

In ageing mice (which has to be said are meeces going to pieces) using the DQ supplements, the markers and inflammatory mediators in their gum tissue were restored to the levels of young mice.

These results echo previous studies proving the strength of implementing natural compounds in the realm of oral and systemic health.

Most interestingly, this specific research found that the combination supplements also prevented much of the bone loss of periodontitis. This strongly suggests that the periodontium, being the four main components of the specialised tissues that support the teeth (gingiva, alveolar bone, periodontal ligament, and cementum) can ultimately be preserved with senotherapy.

As a widely available, over the counter supplement, quercetin does have side-effects. The Penn Dental Medicine team endeavours to begin early-stage clinical trials to assess quercetin as either a stand-alone agent in the management of periodontal disease; or intermittently including low doses of dasatinib, which is currently used in the treatment of leukaemia.

All of it is an extremely positive foundation for an effective, targeted therapy option for the global health burden of periodontal disease.

To be able to throw a permanent spanner into the works of this chronic, inflammatory and life-altering affliction is undoubtedly, worth waiting for.

And yes. I do want it to hurry up.

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