Dental tidbits
Mask wearing causes cavities in the kiddos. What's a Mother to do?
Was having a delightful dinner with fellow maskless friends last week. One is Mom to kid who spends all day at school forced to wear a mask. She lamented that, for the first time, her child has tooth cavities - seven! Had no idea as to why this happened.
I was the bearer of the bad news. It was the intensely hated forced-to-wear child-abusing face masks that caused these dental defects. Halitosis and dental caries are possible when people cover their faces for long periods of time. Because these wearers tend to breathe from their mouths, it leads to drying out all that saliva that usually protects us from getting cavities. The oral bacteria have a more fertile breeding ground, thus are more likely to have tooth decay, and bad breath.
What’s a mother to do?!
It fell to me to come up with some positive news to counter my buzz kill dinner table conversation. Luckily, I also saw new research on the use of plain old aspirin, to stop the decay, even restoring teeth. Treatment of stem cells from teeth with low-dose aspirin increased mineralization and dentine. It enhanced the function of stem cells found in the teeth thus helping self-repair by regenerating lost tooth structure.
And that wasn’t the only bit of positive news. Science mag featured a detailed developmental study of teeth generation and regeneration in mice. They described the role of Bone Morphogenic Protein (BMP) and the development of a monoclonal antibody that could potentionally be therapeutic.
The team reports that an antibody for one gene—uterine sensitization associated gene-1 or USAG-1—can stimulate tooth growth in mice suffering from tooth agenesis, a congenital condition. … One promising antibody, however, disrupted the interaction of USAG-1 with BMP only.
Experiments with this antibody revealed that BMP signaling is essential for determining the number of teeth in mice. Moreover, a single administration was enough to generate a whole tooth. Subsequent experiments showed the same benefits in ferrets.
So I suggested to the Mom, that they try a little bit of a paste of baby aspirin on the affected teeth and see if it helps.
But of course, first, TEAR OFF THE MASKS!
REFERENCES
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article244928707.html
Research shows aspirin could repair tooth decay https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-09-aspirin-tooth.html
New drug to regenerate lost teeth (2021) https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-03-drug-regenerate-lost-teeth.html
Anti–USAG-1 therapy for tooth regeneration through enhanced BMP signaling https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/7/eabf1798
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