Oral Health and Diabetic Cardiomyopathy: Mechanisms, Biomarkers, and Early Screening Approaches

Diabetic Cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a common cardiovascular complication in patients with diabetes. In recent years, the association between oral health and diabetic heart disease has gained increasing attention. This perspective reviews the potential mechanisms of oral diseases in diabetic heart disease, oral indicators for early screening of diabetic heart disease, and proposes future research directions. The potential mechanisms of oral diseases in diabetic heart disease primarily involve abnormal activation of inflammatory responses, dysregulation of the oral microbiome, and immune system disorders. In the context of early screening for diabetic heart disease, oral health indices, salivary biomarkers, and the oral microbiome serve as critical oral indicators with significant clinical value for early diagnosis. Future research should promote interdisciplinary diagnosis and collaboration, develop non-invasive early screening technologies, integrate multimodal and multi-omics oral data, leverage large-scale multicenter clinical data to comprehensively evaluate the association between oral health indicators and diabetic cardiomyopathy, and simultaneously train and validate precise artificial intelligence models. This perspective integrates existing research findings on the role of oral health in diabetic heart disease, highlights current research limitations, and emphasizes the need for further studies to clarify causal relationships and facilitate widespread clinical application.