The idea is that monitoring this pressure for several days as the patient recovers in hospital will provide an early warning of a potentially fatal condition called cardiac tamponade.

If it’s not spotted in time, cardiac tamponade often results in emergency open-heart surgery to ease the pressure on the heart — a procedure with a mortality rate of up to 70 per cent.

However, its developers were recently awarded a £500,000 grant by Innovate UK, a public body that finances groundbreaking technologies, and it is due to undergo testing at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the next year or so.

Professor Gerard Stansby, an honorary consultant vascular surgeon at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: ‘This sounds potentially very useful, as long as it doesn’t have adverse effects such as bleeding or infection.’

So brush before breakfast — and if you want that clean-mouth feel after eating, try chewing sugar-free gum, which will stimulate saliva production, which will then wash away any food debris and restore the pH in the mouth so it is less acidic.

‘We’re now trying to find out why transit time and bacteria types are linked,’ says Dr Sarah Berry, a reader in nutritional science at King’s College London.