Exposure to early-life adversity is one of the biggest risk factors for both mental and physical health problems across the lifespan. A need for objective measures that are noninvasive, inexpensive, and able to provide more accurate information about the presence and timing of childhood adversity has been recognized. If such a measure existed, its public health implications would be profound. For the first time, clinicians would be able with confidence to identify children on a population-wide scale who experienced childhood adversity during sensitive periods in development and therefore are at future risk for developing a psychiatric or other disorder. A manuscript appearing in the March 2020 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry advances the proposition that teeth potentially could serve as a promising and actionable new tool capable of achieving key primary prevention goals. To support this claim, researchers first summarized empirical work from dentistry, anthropology, and archaeology on human tooth development and show how these fields collectively have studied human and animal teeth for decades, using teeth as time capsules that preserve a permanent, time-resolved record of life experiences in the physical environment.
Specifically, the investigators articulate how teeth have been examined in these fields as biological fossils in which the history of an individual’s early-life experiences is permanently imprinted, acknowledging that this line of research is related to, but distinct from, studies of oral health. They then integrate these insights with knowledge about the role of psychosocial adversity in shaping psychopathology risk to present a working conceptual model, which proposes that teeth may be an understudied yet suggestive new tool to identify individuals at risk for mental health problems following early-life psychosocial stress exposure. They end by presenting a research agenda and discussion of future directions for rigorously testing this possibility and with a call to action for interdisciplinary research to meet the urgent need for new biomarkers of adversity and psychiatric outcomes.
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