Researchers think this dental floss could track cancer and tell if you're stressed. Here's how
Could flossing your teeth help you track your physical and mental health?
Researchers at Boston's Tufts University say they've designed a floss pick system that could one day be used to track a wide range of conditions, including stress – and cancer.
The device works by measuring cortisol, which is known as our stress hormone.
'We didn't want measurement to create an additional source of stress, so we thought, can we make a sensing device that becomes part of your day-to-day routine? Cortisol is a stress marker found in saliva, so flossing seemed like a natural fit to take a daily sample,' Sameer Sonkusale, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, explained in a statement.
ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.
The specially designed floss looks just like a common floss pick that consumers can pick up at a pharmacy store.
So, how does it work?
The string picks up saliva through a narrow channel in the floss. It's drawn into the pick handle and an attached tab, where it spreads across electrical conductors that detect the cortisol.
The cortisol is recognized using a technology called electropolymerized molecularly imprinted polymers, or eMIPs, for short. The university noted that it works kind of similarly to a plaster cast, leaving the 'memory' of the cortisol molecule in a polymer around it. Plastic and rubber are types of polymers.
This cast could be used to detect cortisol and other molecules in saliva, the researchers said. It could even be used to monitor glucose for diabetes or markers for cancer. It could possibly detect multiple issues at once.
'Biosensors have typically been developed using antibodies or other receptors that pick up the molecule of interest. Once a marker is found, a lot of work has to go into bioengineering the receiving molecule attached to the sensor,' said Sonkusale. He noted that eMIP 'does not rely on a lot of investment in making antibodies or receptors. If you discover a new marker for stress or any other disease or condition, you can just create a polymer cast in a very short period of time.'
Furthermore, the researchers say the sensors are accurate — and comparable to the best-performing sensors on the market. They're currently creating a startup to try and bring the product to market.
However, Sonkusale noted that saliva markers can still have variations among individuals.
'For diagnostics, blood is still the gold standard,' he said. 'But once you are diagnosed and put on medication, if you need to track, say, a cardiovascular condition over time to see if your heart health is improving, then monitoring with the sensor can be easy and allows for timely interventions when needed.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Liver disease is on the rise in the UK due to soaring obesity levels, but a 10-minute stroll each day can help stop it in its tracks
Walking for just ten minutes a day can cut the risk of developing fatty liver disease, which affects up to one in three adults. The build-up of dangerous fat in the organ is usually triggered by an unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyle. Rates of the disease – which can significantly increase the risk of liver cancer – have risen in the UK due to soaring obesity levels. In a new study, scientists from the University of Oxford followed more than 91,000 people to see if daily activity levels were related to their chances of fat accumulating in the liver. Volunteers wore a wrist device for seven days to measure the number of steps they took. The study, published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, showed the more they walked, the less likely they were to develop the potentially fatal condition. For every 1,000 steps – or approximately 10 minutes of movement – the chances of getting fatty liver dropped by around 12 per cent, researchers found. Although it's common, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can be hard to detect, as there are few external signs of it and no obvious symptoms during the early stages. A healthy liver should contain no fat at all and most people with the condition have no idea they are affected. While it's linked to obesity, some sufferers can be slim but with hidden fat deposits in and around the liver. Previous studies have found the disease can be stopped in its tracks by losing around 10 per cent of body weight.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Chris Hadfield: ‘Worst space chore? Fixing the toilet. It's even worse when it's weightless'
What's the most chaotic thing that's ever happened to you in space? Launch – you go from no speed at all to 17,500 miles an hour in under nine minutes. The chaos is spectacular, the power of it is just wild, the physical vibration and force of it is mind-numbing – and it all happens so blisteringly fast. In the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, you go from lying on your back in Florida to being weightless in space. It's just the most amazing, chaotic, spectacular, rare human experience I've ever had. As an astronaut you have to master so many skills; have you ever not known something in space and wished you did? Onboard a spaceship, if you have an electrical problem, an attitude control problem, a propulsion problem, a computer problem – one of the first things you lose is communications with Earth. So it's really important to have all the skills on board. I served as an astronaut for 21 years and I was only in space for six months – that gave me 20-and-a-half years to not have to be surprised or flummoxed while I was in space. As an example, I qualified as an emergency medical technician. I worked in the cadaver lab [of Hermann hospital in Houston, near Nasa] to get familiar with the human body and then I worked in all of the wards of the hospital. I assisted a surgeon who was doing full abdominal surgery on an accident victim and then I worked in emergency, doing all the immediate triage. I had to get all of those skills just in case we had a medical problem on the spaceship. We take preparation really seriously so that we won't just be tourists up there. You've written six books; which book or author do you always return to? It depends which book I'm writing. I've written three nonfiction and three thrillers, and when I'm writing thriller fiction I tend to read that, because it gets your mind in the groove. I have lots of favourite thriller authors – Robert Ludlum, John D MacDonald and Jonathan Kellerman … I go back and read those, study how they make you feel so compelled. What about favourite sci-fi? [Growing up] I read Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. I got to spend a day with Arthur C Clarke – he came to the Kennedy Space Centre, I spent a whole day showing him the space shuttle and the launch site, and it was like a dream come true because he'd been one of my science fiction idols growing up. [In 2015] Ray Bradbury's family asked me to write an introduction for the Folio Society re-release of The Martian Chronicles – I'd read it once a long time ago but I'd forgotten just what an exquisitely good writer he was. The Martian Chronicles was written just after the second world war, so after the first two atomic bombs had been released and killed so many people but before the very first space flight. It was a really interesting moment in time – of both despair and disgust at human behaviour and then hope. And it's a beautiful book. How likely do you think it is that there is intelligent life in space? We have found no evidence but we know that every star has at least one planet, and our telescopes are so good now that we can actually find how many of those planets are close enough to Earth that they could support life as we know it, and it's around 5%. And so if 5% of every planet could sustain life, we can count the stars in the universe and [estimate] how many planets there are that could sustain life. And the number is staggeringly huge – it's like a quintillion of planets. So the odds are overwhelming that there's got to be life in other places … [But] it was only quite recently that life on Earth evolved – through time and chance – into multi-cellular life, and then complex life, and then to be self-aware and have intelligence. My conclusion is that life will be common: we'll find slime and scum all over the place. But intelligent life I think is exquisitely rare and I think we should internalise that and think about the level of responsibility that we should adopt. What's your favourite space movie? 2001: A Space Odyssey. I just find it fascinating and intriguing and a beautiful Stanley Kubrick adaptation of Arthur C Clarke's vision of things. It's very thought-provoking even almost 60 years later. I think The Martian is a very good movie and the Andy Weir book [it's based on] – I love that. I think Ron Howard did a beautiful job with Apollo 13 – it's almost a documentary. He worked so hard, he spent time with the astronauts, he filmed in a zero G aeroplane. Tell us your favourite fact. The most experienced astronaut in all of American history is a woman named Peggy Whitson. She's flown in space multiple times [and] been longer in space than any other American. She's commanded the space station twice. She's done 10 spacewalks and she's been the chief astronaut for Nasa. She's a tour de force. She's a good friend. She's a great person. Do you have a party trick? I'm a musician, I play guitar and sing – and I have the type of head that remembers lyrics. So my party trick is that I have probably 500 songs that I can play at any moment and know every single word and every single chord all the way from the start to the finish. It's just the way my brain works. It's kind of silly but it's really fun to be a human jukebox and have people say, 'Hey, can you play that song?' When I'm on stage in Australia, I'll have a guitar and I'll play a few songs. What's the worst space chore? Fixing the toilet. They break all the time. Being elbows deep in a toilet anywhere is no fun – it's even worse when it's weightless. And the trouble with our toilets is they have really nasty, poisonous chemicals and filters in them to try and process what's going through so that we can turn our urine and sweat back into drinking water, because we recycle about 93-94% of the water on board. What's the best lesson you learned from someone you've worked with? We were in the space shuttle simulator [with commander Kent Vernon 'Rommel' Rominger] and one of the crew members, Scott, had this cool and exciting idea. He came ripping up to the cockpit and plunked his laptop down to show him the solution to the problem and he knocked over Rommel's can of Coke – it flipped upside down and started emptying itself into all of his checklists. Rommel turned the can right side up and didn't say a thing. What this guy had come up with would be hugely important in the success of our mission. A little Coke spilled is unimportant – you can get more checklists. The natural reaction would have been, 'What the heck are you doing? Don't be so clumsy and look at the mess you made.' Instead, Rommel was like, 'Who cares? What I don't want Scott to think about next time he's got a great idea is, 'Oh, I gotta be careful I don't spill the commander's Coke.'' He should be excited about new ideas. And so, for me, it was a really great study of leadership. What song do you want played at your funeral? Danny Boy. It's a lovely reversal of how people normally look at death and who's grieving and why, and how you anticipate the grieving of death. It is an exquisitely and hauntingly beautiful song, and it's worth knowing the lyrics. Chris Hadfield's Journey to The Cosmos is touring Australia: Perth (27 June), Sydney (28 June), Brisbane (29 June), Melbourne (1 July) and Adelaide (3 July)
The Independent
4 hours ago
- The Independent
Obama's doctor says Biden's physician should have given him cognitive tests
Former President Joe Biden 's doctor should have given him more cognitive tests, according to the doctor of former President Barack Obama. Jeffrey Kuhlman, who served as Obama's doctor between 2009 and 2013, told the New York Post on Saturday that Biden and any politician over the age of 70 should be given "a few hours" of annual mental exams that should be accessible to the public. 'My position is that a 78-year-old candidate, Trump at the time, an 82-year-old president [Biden] would both benefit from neurocognitive testing,' Kuhlman said. He went on to say that "any politician over the age of 70 has normal age-related cognitive decline," and pointed out that he's been recommending annual mental exams for more than a year. Biden's doctor, Kevin O'Connor, oversaw three physicals for the president during his time in office, but Kuhlman says the physical reports did not include notes from a neurocognitive specialist. He also pointed out that Biden did not take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which Donald Trump agreed to take during his first term. That test is a two-minute screening test of about 30 questions that probes for signs of dementia, according to Kuhlman. Obama's doctor said that he had "no doubts" that Trump "aced" the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, but said he believes that the White House should also release the CT scans taken after Trump's attempted assassination last year. While the Montreal test is able to detect some basic signs of dementia, the doctor noted that it wasn't adequate for determining more serious cognitive issues. According to Kuhlman, mental processing speed and spacial visualization all begin to decline around the age of 60. Kuhlman said he respected O'Connor's medical judgement, but added that "sometimes those closest to the trees miss the forest." O'Connor told the New York Post in July 2024 — just days after the then-president announced he would not run for re-election — that Biden's cognitive health was "excellent." Then-White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted to the public that Biden didn't "need a cognitive test" because he "passes a cognitive test every day." She has since decided to leave the Democratic Party and write a tell-all book about her time in the White House, earning her a savaging by some Democrats. Visitor logs to the White House show that Biden did submit an evaluation form to an expert in Parkinson's Disease, but O'Connor said that the meeting was part of Biden's annual physical. Kuhlman says that the doctor who evaluated Biden in that visit, Kevin Cannard, had been evaluating Biden for 14 years, and that he trusts the doctor's evaluation. O'Connor was subpoenaed by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee on Thursday to stand for questioning about Biden's mental abilities during a hearing on June 27. Shortly after the House investigation was launched, the Trump administration issued a memo stating that it was issuing its own investigation into whether or not people other than Biden used an autopen signature device to sign off on executive actions during the late period of Biden's presidential term. Both investigations follow the release of a book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, titled Original Sin, that alleges a mass coverup of Biden's cognitive impairment by those closest to him.
