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Text mining enables search, extraction, categorisation and information visualisation. This study aimed to identify oral manifestations in patients with COVID-19 using text mining to facilitate extracting relevant clinical information from a large set of publications. A list of publications from the open-access COVID-19 Open Research Dataset was downloaded using keywords related to oral health and dentistry. A total of 694,366 documents were retrieved. Filtering the articles using text mining yielded 1,554 oral health/dentistry papers. The list of articles was classified into five topics after applying a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. This classification was compared to the author's classification which yielded 17 categories. After a full-text review of articles in the category "Oral manifestations in patients with COVID-19", eight papers were selected to extract data. The most frequent oral manifestations were xerostomia (n = 405, 17.8%) and mouth pain or swelling (n = 289, 12.7%). These oral manifestations in patients with COVID-19 must be considered with other symptoms to diminish the risk of dentist-patient infection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been hypothesised that oral bacteria can migrate, through the blood, from the mouth to the arterial plaques, thus exacerbating atherosclerosis. This study compared bacteria present in the peripheral blood of individuals with and without coronary artery disease (CAD). RNA sequences obtained from blood were downloaded from GEO (GSE58150). Eight patients with coronary artery calcification (CAC) scoring > 500 and eight healthy individuals were analysed. After conducting quality control, the sequences were aligned to the hg38 reference genome using Hisat2. Bacterial taxa were analysed by inputting the unmapped sequences into Kraken. Ecological indices were calculated using Vegan. The package DESeq2 was used to compare the counts of bacteria per standard rank between groups. A total of 51 species were found only in patients with CAD and 41 were exclusively present in healthy individuals. The counts of one phylum, one class, three orders, two families and one genus were significantly different between the analysed groups (p < 0.00032, FDR < 10%), including the orders Cardiobacteriales, Corynebacteriales and Fusobacteriales. Twenty-three bacterial species belonging to the subgingival plaque bacterial complexes were also identified in the blood of individuals from both the groups; Fusobacterium nucleatum was significantly less frequent in patients with CAD (p = 0.0012, FDR = 4.8%). Furthermore, the frequency of another 11 bacteria differed significantly among patients with CAD than that among healthy individuals (p < 0.0030, FDR < 10%). These bacteria have not been previously reported in patients with atherosclerosis and periodontitis. The presence of members of the subgingival plaque bacterial complexes in the blood of patients with CAC supports the hypothesis that the periodontopathogens can be disseminated through the blood flow to other body parts where they may enhance inflammatory processes that can lead to the development or exacerbation of atherosclerosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]