<aside> 👋 The Bristle Oral Health Test provides a complete picture of oral health from a single saliva sample by analyzing all of the beneficial (good) and pathogenic (harmful) bacteria & fungi in the oral microbiome.

Each report contains 7 scores related to health and disease-related conditions. You can read more about what each score means here.

  1. Beneficial Bacteria
  2. Nitric Oxide
  3. Gum Inflammation
  4. Tooth Decay
  5. Halitosis
  6. Gut Impact
  7. Oral Microbiome Diversity </aside>

Insights from Test Results

Oral Health Scores

  1. Gum inflammation score: This score measures the level of inflammation in the gums. It indicates the severity of gum disease or periodontal disease. Certain bacteria are known to cause gum inflammation, and this score may help identify the presence and extent of such bacteria in the mouth.
  2. Tooth decay score: This score measures the risk or progression of tooth decay. It takes into account the abundance of specific bacteria that are associated with tooth decay, such as Streptococcus mutans, Streptococcus sobrinus, Bifidobacterium dentium, Scardovia wiggsiae, and others. Higher scores may indicate a higher risk or presence of tooth decay-causing bacteria.
  3. Beneficial score: The beneficial bacteria score evaluates the presence and abundance of bacteria that have a beneficial or symbiotic relationship with the host. These bacteria perform important functions, such as reducing nitrate into nitrite and nitric oxide. A higher commensal score indicates a healthier balance of beneficial bacteria in the oral microbiome.
  4. Halitosis score: This score assesses the presence and severity of bad breath. It measures the abundance of specific bacteria that contribute to halitosis or bad breath. A higher score suggests a higher likelihood of having bad breath-causing bacteria in the mouth.

Oral-Systemic & Other Scores

  1. Nitrate reduction score: This score evaluates the ability of bacteria in the mouth to convert nitrate into nitrite and nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is known to have important physiological functions in the body. This score reflects the potential nitrate reduction capacity of the oral microbiome.
  2. Gut inflammation score: This score analyzes microbes that can cause significant gut disruption, either through initiating an inflammatory response or by displacing the normal gut microbes that are important for gut health. The abundance of these microbes are reflected in the gut inflammation score, where higher scores are higher risk for gut inflammation from oral microbiomes.
  3. Diversity score: This score looks at the total microbial diversity of a patient’s sample, taking into account the total number of species in one’s microbiome, and the variance of their abundances. Both extremely low and extremely high diversity can indicate oral microbiome dysbiosis, and a healthy microbiome is somewhere in the middle, generally between 1.0 to 9.0.

While diversity alone is not enough to determine the health of a microbiome, it can be an important contributing factor to risk of disease. In general, diversity scores can indicate the stability of a microbiome. Both very high and very low diversity scores are more unstable and likely to change.

Contributing Microbes

The Bristle Oral Health Test is the most comprehensive oral microbiome test available. You can read more about the test here.

Our test sequences the whole genome of all microbes in a sample. This method provides us with a few extra layers of information:

Why does it matter? This is important because fungi and viruses also play a role in health and disease. Without knowing all of the microbes present, you are missing out on important information and an accurate picture of an individual’s oral health.