A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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Claim: The No. 1 cause of heart attacks is a tooth treated for a root canal.
The facts: There’s no credible scientific evidence that having a root canal can cause a heart attack, according to endodontists and cardiologists.
But social media posts claiming there’s a causal link between the two are perpetuating a century-old myth.
The claims, which amassed thousands of likes on Facebook this week, were made in a video featuring a narrator who says “the No. 1 cause of heart attack is a root canal treated tooth, plain and simple, not correlation, not link, cause and effect.”
The video references a highly criticized 2019 documentary.
“There’s no scientific evidence to suggest that root canals are linked to heart attacks or other diseases such as cancer,” according to Dr. Michael Reddy, dean of the school of dentistry at the University of California, San Francisco.
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Dr. Stefan Zweig, president of the American Association of Endodontists, agreed, saying, “There is no credible evidence that having root canal therapy can cause a heart attack.”
The false claim stems from 1920s research that “has since been disproved through controlled research studies,” Reddy said. A researcher at the time...
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