Abstract
Cardiovascular disease is a worldwide human condition which has multiple underlying contributing factors: one of these is long-term increased blood pressure—hypertension. Nitric oxide (NO) is a small nitrogenous radical species that has a number of physiological functions including vasodilation. It can be produced enzymatically through host nitric oxide synthases and by an alternative nitrate–nitrite–NO pathway from ingested inorganic nitrate. It was discovered that this route relies on the ability of the oral microbiota to reduce nitrate to nitrite and NO. Next generation sequencing has been used over the past two decades to gain deeper insight into the microbes involved, their location and the effect of their removal from the oral cavity. This review article presents this research and comments briefly on future directions.
Highlights
Oral microbiota are the second most complex niche of the human microbiome [1]; they have been associated with several non-communicative diseases, including cancer [2], Alzheimer’s disease [3] and cardiovascular disease (CVD) [4,5]
What this study suggested was that dysfunctional endothelial nitric oxide (NO) production and availability might precede the formation of clinically significant atherosclerotic lesions—today known as endothelial dysfunction
Chlorhexidine can abolish the effect of sodium nitrate supplementation [34,40,41,42] and Hyde et al [39,43] showed that its use as a mouth rinse in rats decreased Haemophilus, Aggregaterbacter, and Micrococcaceae but increased Enterobacteriaceae, Corynebacterium and Morganella with the overall effect being an increase in diversity through a change in low abundance taxa in the baseline samples
Summary
Oral microbiota are the second most complex niche of the human microbiome [1]; they have been associated with several non-communicative diseases, including cancer [2], Alzheimer’s disease [3] and cardiovascular disease (CVD) [4,5]. Koopman et al [38] demonstrated this loss of diversity when growing saliva samples in a nitrate-reducing bacteria discovery study. Using principal coordinate analysis (PCoA), they showed that the samples with high nitrate reduction capacity were more likely to contain Granulicatella, Veillonella, Neisseria, Actinomyces, Prevotella, Haemophilus, Fusobacterium and some unclassified species of the Gemellaceae family.
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