Dr. Hayes discusses what her study and previous studies say about the linkage in question.
Transcript
In science, we’re trying to determine what is, what is the truth. What is the real relationship between fluoride and osteosarcoma?
There was a question raised in the early 90s from an animal study and what they found was that there were cancers that developed in some of the rats but not in the majority of rats. Subsequent to that, there were descriptive studies that looked at this association and found nothing in humans.
We have now multiple research studies that show that it does not cause osteosarcoma. There are a variety of types of human research studies. Some of them are less definitive than others, not to say that they’re not important but they’re usually what we call a first step in an investigation.
What we really want to look at is more definitive studies, and this study is the definitive study on osteosarcoma risk and fluoride because it actually looked at bone levels of fluoride from humans who have this disease and bone levels of fluoride from humans who did not have the disease. And what we found is there was absolutely no difference in those fluoride levels. That’s a very definitive conclusion.
Fluoride has been studied for many, many years, and there’s never been a scientific study that has determined definitively that fluoride is related to any health risks. And I feel very comfortable as a board-certified dentist telling anyone who came to me for advice that fluoride is not only safe but highly effective and highly cost-effective. And it’s considered to be one of the top ten public health interventions of the last century by the Centers of Disease Control.