The Short Story:
- All bad bacteria leave smelly gas fingerprints as evidence of their presence
- But some bad bacteria are much worse than others
- To identify whether the worst bacteria are in your mouth – we need mugshots
- Oral DNA testing is our version of mugshots
The Rest of the Story:
Other Tools of Forensic Analysis: We’ve described how analyzing gasses in your breath is a fantastic tool that helps us discover evidence of what might be going on inside your mouth at the microscopic level. But Gas Chromatography isn’t a magic bullet.
So, while ‘fingerprinting’ your breath tells us if uninvited bacterial criminals are present in your mouth, that test alone doesn’t let us know exactly which of the specific bad guys we might be dealing with. That’s important because some of these bacteria are much more dangerous than others.
Oral DNA Testing
So, if we find ‘prints’, the next thing we want do is examine “mugshots” of the suspects – to make sure that none of ‘most wanted’ list of bad bacteria is living inside your mouth. We accomplish this by using oral DNA testing. It really is like an episode of CSI: Mouth.
By taking a sample of your saliva and sending it to a lab, we can see whether or not any of the 11 most damaging oral bacteria are dwelling within you. Then, once we know who we are dealing with, we can design an appropriate set of treatment protocols that work on minimizing the problem at its source. In this way, we focus on dealing with the cause of any oral problems you might have – instead of just chasing symptoms and fixing the damage after it occurs.
