Surgeons at Hiroshima University Hospital counted the teeth in 339 patients before removing part or all of their pancreas, and the number they wrote down turned out to track how long those patients lived.
Patients who still had 21 or more natural teeth survived a median of 60.7 months after surgery for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Patients with 20 or fewer survived a median of 39.1 months. That is a gap of nearly two years in a disease whose expected course is about two years.
