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A common culprit behind severe gum disease may also stiffen and narrow the heart's aortic valve, preliminary research suggests. This may help explain links between gum problems and poor heart health.

Scientists have long linked severe gum disease to inflammation throughout the body and a higher risk of heart problems , including coronary artery disease , which can raise the risk of heart attack. Studies have also found that treating gum disease can improve blood-vessel health.

Now, researchers suggest that Porphyromonas gingivalis , one of the main bacteria involved in severe gum disease, may also contribute to calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD), a condition in which calcium builds up in the heart's aortic valve. The findings were presented in July at a meeting of the American Heart Association in Boston and have not been peer-reviewed yet.

Dr. Elena Aikawa , a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study, said the findings "fit well with our current understanding of calcific aortic valve disease as an active, inflammation-driven disease rather than simply wear and tear of the valve."

Periodontal disease is likely just one contributor among many, rather than the sole cause of CAVD, she added. But the study does identify a biologically plausible pathway linking oral health to heart health that could open new opportunities for prevention and treatment.

How mouth bacteria harm the heart

CAVD affects millions of people worldwide , and there are no approved drugs that slow or stop its progression. As the disease worsens, people may develop fatigue, shortness of breath and chest pain, and in severe cases, they often require valve-replacement surgery .

Meanwhile, prior to the new research, it was known that bacteria and inflammatory signals from the mouth can sometimes enter the bloodstream and affect distant tissues, said Richard Lamont , chair of oral immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Louisville School of Dentistry, who was not involved in the study. Over time, these effects can accrue and gradually reshape how the immune system behaves, he said.

In CAVD, calcium builds up in the aortic valve, which connects the left side of the heart to the large artery that carries oxygen-rich blood to the body. (Image credit: Noctiluxx via Getty Images) P. gingivalis is known to be particularly destructive to gum tissue, causing lots of inflammation, and it's been tied to cardiovascular disease in the past. To see if the bacterium might be directly impacting heart health, researchers at Fuwai Hospital in Beijing looked for P. gingivalis in aortic valve tissue removed during valve-replacement surgery. They compared this diseased tissue to valves that weren't calcified.

The calcified valves contained much higher levels of P. gingivalis DNA and proteins made by the bacterium. " P. gingivalis was about 30 times more abundant in calcified valves than in non-calcified valves," study first author Dr. Chenyang Li , a doctoral candidate at Fuwai Hospital, told Live Science in an email.

To test whether the bacteria might directly contribute to valve damage, Li and colleagues injected live P. gingivalis into the bloodstreams of healthy lab mice. The bacteria reached the animals' aortic valves, triggering inflammation, calcium buildup and narrowing of the valve.

"We were surprised to see valve calcification even in mice without high cholesterol," Li said. "This suggests P. gingivalis may directly contribute to valve disease, beyond traditional cardiovascular risk factors."

A comparison group of mice was given antibiotics before the injection and had less bacteria in their aortic valves and slower disease progression. Meanwhile, mice injected with dead P. gingivalis bacteria did not show any changes in their aortic valves.

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The researchers traced the changes in the mice's hearts to interleukin-1 beta, a signalling molecule that normally helps the body fight infections. Exposure to P. gingivalis ramped up the production of this molecule, and in turn, the immune signal switched on genes that pushed healthy valve cells to behave more like bone-building cells, which is a hallmark of CAVD . This switch causes the cells to lay down calcium in the surrounding valve tissue.

When the scientists blocked interleukin-1 beta in some mice, the animals developed much less valve calcification even when the bacteria reached the valve. Lamont said that the mouse experiments strengthen the case that there's a biological mechanism directly linking gum and heart diseases. However, he cautioned that mice have very different oral microbiomes than humans, making it difficult to know whether the exact same process occurs in people.

That said, the team also saw the same pattern in human valve cells grown in the lab. Exposure to P. gingivalis increased inflammation and calcium buildup among the cells, while blocking interleukin-1 beta blunted those effects.

Both Aikawa and Lamont said more research is needed to confirm the relationship in humans. The findings give researchers a new pathway to explore for future treatments, raising questions of whether targeting inflammatory signals like interleukin-1 beta could help slow the progression of this widespread heart disease.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

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During a pivotal moment in The Odyssey , Circe sends Odysseus to the Kingdom of the Dead to find the soothsayer who can instruct him on how to return home after more than a dozen years away. But to travel to the Kingdom of the Dead, our “complicated” (the most fitting Homeric epithet, introduced only a few years ago in Emily Wilson’s translation) protagonist must traverse the world’s boundary in the form of the Stream of Oceanos and the city Cimmerian, where mortals live in total darkness. Here, the dead speak the truth, but only if you first feed them blood from the living. How’s that for a metaphor?

At its heart, The Odyssey is a quest narrative. An adventure story. The hero must leave home—though was it really necessary to go slaughter so many people in a faraway city?—and, after trials and tribulations, return changed.

Back home, his wife Penelope wonders: Is Odysseus alive? Will he ever return? We readers know the answers because we are allowed to rove across the text and through the ancient Greek world, but she is stuck in Ithaca with no cell phone and no Internet.

At some point in my recent re-reading of the tale, I began to wonder: Does Penelope even want him to return?

Penelope resists believing at first that the man who has returned is actually her husband, and maybe that resistance points to the real tragedy: not how long it took him to return but the fact that he does so at all.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

*

In addition to the throughline of the quest, The Odyssey juggles multiple characters in multiple places and creates nested stories that move back-and-forth in time. It starts, famously, in medias res (as Horace advises we all should). The narrative spools and unspools. The son, Telemachus, leaves in search of his father while at the same time Odysseus attempts to return. Penelope tells the suitors, who party day and night and eat all her food, that she will marry when she finishes weaving her father-in-law’s shroud, but she unravels it again each night. There are gods and battles and danger and magic and romance—it is, in a word, epic . It’s also just a story about a guy trying to get home.

But The Odyssey gives more attention to the female than The Iliad, certainly, and more than most ancient texts, such that some early scholars theorized it had actually been written by a woman: the narrative opens with Penelope, not Odysseus; the suitors are said to admire her for her intelligence and wit; the central deity of the text is the goddess Athena, rather than Zeus.

I didn’t set out to incorporate a retelling of The Odyssey into my second novel Mudlark . I dipped back into The Odyssey when Emily Wilson’s translation came out in 2017—in the 60-plus translations into English, hers is the first by a woman—and then I couldn’t unsee it everywhere I looked, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Mad Max: Fury Road. We also live in a literary world rich with retellings of Homer (just look to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad , Madeline Miller’s Circe , Claire North’s The Songs of Penelope ).

Emily Wilson makes the claim that Penelope’s dominant characteristic in the poem is her “opacity,” how little we really know about her mind or desires. What if Penelope’s waiting is her own form of aggression, a way of holding a space, for as long as possible, that excludes the men and their own attempts at power? Penelope resists believing at first that the man who has returned is actually her husband, and maybe that resistance points to the real tragedy: not how long it took him to return but the fact that he does so at all.

In this way, The Odyssey is ripe for us to project our own ideas onto it. With Mudlark , I envisioned my own quest narrative. Like Odysseus, my character Neko is also looking for answers that may only come from beyond The Veil, and like him, she is in search of a lost home. Her mother, Jenny Sweet, a middle-aged indie rock musician, works on a solo album inspired by The Odyssey, a sort of apocryphal retelling from the female perspective, as she thinks of it.

The Odyssey hasn’t survived because of what it tells us about the ancient world or about the long shadow of Western patriarchy, but because of what it continues to tell us about ourselves, today, here.

Does anyone remember that Scylla and Charybdis are not monsters but goddesses? In her album, Jenny Sweet portrays them as mothers angry at how humans have warmed their waters, turning them into lobsters in a pot being boiled alive by climate change. The sirens are “nags” telling any boat that passes how they want childcare and healthcare. They want equal pay for equal work. Each age sees metaphors of their own struggles in these ancient texts.

I am absolutely not the first person to reframe this story from the perspective of a woman, and I trust that I am far from the last. We are like Penelope, unraveling Homer’s tale for our own purposes.

*

Jenny Sweet’s album is called The Wreckage , and developing her character also made me think about the ways in which rock musicians might be the epic poets of our age. While we know The Odyssey was written down between the late eighth and late seventh century BCE, we also know that it was part of an oral tradition for hundreds of years before that. The repetitions and formulaic expressions (rosy fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea) are like the choruses of our pop songs, and the dactylic hexameter is like the melody. A band comes together to write collectively, and then other bands cover and reframe those same songs. This is also how The Odyssey has traveled through time. It was not composed by one person but woven together by many voices.

Like all the best stories, The Odyssey hasn’t survived because of what it tells us about the ancient world or about the long shadow of Western patriarchy, but because of what it continues to tell us about ourselves, today, here. Like Penelope’s shroud, it is woven and unwoven, always becoming, never complete. Maybe it is another way to put off the end of our own story. Another way to feed the dead from the blood of the living. Maybe that’s all it is or maybe that’s everything.

____________________________

Mudlark by Mary Helen Specht is available from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

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For the first time, astronomers have reconstructed the magnetic field of an entire cluster of galaxies, from its central nucleus to its outer limits.

The record-breaking achievement is the product of the deepest-ever observations of the galaxy cluster Abell 2255, located around a billion light-years away — and those observations are thanks to the European radio telescope LOFAR (Low Frequency Array).

Abell 2255 has long been known for its complexity in radio waves. Its vast, diffuse radio emissions are created by particles called electrons racing at near-light, or relativistic, speeds and interacting with magnetic fields of galaxies in the cluster. Thus, using Abell 2255 as a cosmic laboratory to study the universe in radio waves could lead scientists to a better understanding of how magnetic fields come about and evolve. These observations could also help paint a picture of the dynamics of hot gas in galaxy clusters . This could reveal how the largest structures in the universe are constructed.

As part of the LOFAR Galaxy Cluster Ultra-Deep Field project, this team used 224 hours of radio image collection to discover that the distribution of large-scale magnetic fields throughout Abell 2255 (which itself stretches out for several million light-years) are not randomly distributed. Instead, these magnetic fields seem to be organized by the motion of gas that occurred during the formation of this galactic cluster.

"Obtaining very sensitive images of galaxy clusters at radio wavelengths is crucial to understanding how electrons are accelerated to relativistic speeds and magnetic fields are amplified on large cosmic scales," team leader Andrea Botteon, of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), said in a statement. "The complexity of these studies is due to the elusiveness of the radio signal from electrons moving in very weak magnetic fields. We believe that the mechanism that 'turns on' these gigantic radio emissions is linked to the formation process of galaxy clusters."

Botteon added that for this research he and his colleagues combined the deepest radio observations ever made with an innovative data analysis technique that allowed them to reconstruct the shape of a galaxy cluster's magnetic field for the first time.

"The coherence of the magnetic field lines observed in some regions of the cluster suggests that the morphology of the field is intimately linked to the dynamics of the gas in which it resides, where it can be 'stretched' or 'compressed' by the motions associated with the formation of the cluster itself," Botteon said.

The invisible texture of the magnetic field in the central region of the galaxy cluster Abell 2255. (Image credit: A. Botteon et al. (INAF), A&A 2026) This analysis revealed that, in some regions, the magnetic fields follow very specific directions, stretching radially along extended radio emissions. In contrast to this, in regions dominated by shock waves, magnetic fields are orientated at tangents. This suggests magnetic fields in Abell 2255 are carved out by the same dynamics that allow clusters to accrete gas and grow.

This serves as the first observational evidence that the same mechanisms that allow galaxies to grow and cluster, creating the largest structures in the universe , also shape their magnetic fields.

The team's research has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available as a pre-peer-reviewed paper on the repository site arXiv.