Executive Mouth

To such ills as high blood pressure and heart disease that often accompany the businessman's strenuous pace, Dr. James N. Lynch, secretary of the Chicago Dental Society, last week added "executive mouth." Plenty of dental defects, said Dr. Lynch, are caused by "the same factors that contribute to what we call success in life." Hard-driving businessmen seeking release from stress clench their teeth, jut their jaws, grind their molars--both on the job and in their sleep. In cases of irregular bite, this leads to pyorrhea, which causes the bone around the tooth to dissolve. Result: the teeth loosen and may fall out.

Executive mouth is not limited to jobs with tension, says Dr. Lynch; even manual laborers with a strong drive to succeed may take their troubles out on their teeth. The executive-mouth victim might conceivably "be a ditchdigger who gets frustrated because he wants to dig better ditches, and somehow can't do it."

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