To the Editor.
—I would like to congratulate Dr Daniell1 for his superb report on tooth loss, osteoporosis, and smoking. I wish also to applaud the Archives for bringing to the attention of the medical community the significance of the oral cavity in general health and disease, an area that has received relatively little attention.As a matter of fact, the subject of systemic influences in tooth loss has been accorded minimal note even in the dental literature, where oral pathosis in general and tooth loss in particular are almost exclusively associated with oral hygiene.Finally, I should like to help solve the mystery of systemic influences in tooth loss by sharing some of my own observations over the past 20 years. By way of introduction, I might point out that very little information has appeared in the medical literature on tooth loss and carbohydrate metabolism. In 1949, Barach