So, you’re not happy with the way you look, but after a silicone implant or two in your
butt, some digging and scraping around the belly area to give you a chiseled six-pack,
a bit off the nose and an extension of the top lip, you think you are getting there.
The problem is, you ate too many candies when you were a kid and your teeth are in terrible
shape.
One root canal led to another, and before you knew it your mouth was a network of dead
nerves and expensive silver crowns.
“One day,” said your dentist, “all these will have to come out.”
You really don’t like the thought of having false teeth.
And that was a reality for many people, until now, because re-growing teeth is coming to
a dental surgery near you.
In 2018 the U.S. media told us that a “revolution” was underway in dental care.
It’s about time, too.
If you look at the statistics, in the U.S. alone around 91 percent of people aged 21
to 64 have regular dental problems.
Those of you watching this have no doubt had many trips to the ‘chair’, not always
welcomed, and often feared.
According to the American College of Prosthodontists – those are the people who replace your
ailing fangs and their friends– around 15 percent of the edentulous population in the
USA has false teeth made every year.
“Edentulous”, that’s a word you’ve never heard.
Well, it simply means people who are lacking teeth.
That same college said there are many of these people in the U.S., and around 36 million
Americans are missing a lot of teeth.
120 million Americans are at least missing one tooth, with the reason simply being wear
and tear in most cases, but cancer and gum disease might also be the problem.
The organization also wrote, “In the geriatric population the ratio of edentulous individuals
is 2 to 1.
About 23 million are completely edentulous and about 12 million are edentulous in one
arch.”
What we are trying to say of course is that losing teeth is hardly something none of us
can relate to.
It’s part of life, whether you got your tooth knocked out by a zealous soccer defender
or you just overdid it with the sugar.
Although it’s a fairly normal thing to happen, it also something we all dread.
So much so, that losing teeth is actually a very common nightmare.
Losing your teeth, say the brain experts, means you think you are losing control of
your life.
It makes sense.
But what if you didn’t have to lose teeth anymore?
What if you could grow them back?
Wouldn’t that be great.
Well, it seems that’s where we are heading.
What’s been happening in the lab of late proves teeth can be regrown and we may never
need a prosthetic tooth again.
How it’s done is almost like a magic trick, because scientists have literally been fooling
the mouth.
What’s been happening is they have been using a laser beam, in the words of NBC, “to
coax dental stem cells to form dentin, the hard tissue similar to bone that makes up
most of a tooth.”
Yep, a laser can make your mouth want to regrow teeth.
And this is not just a mere possibility, it’s worked on rats and mice in the lab.
One day the poor lab rat was struggling to get through a whole carrot and a few weeks
later he was chomping on those hard orange sticks with abandon.
But a world in which no one ever needs to have a toothless mouth again, where cavities
and cancer will never mean a molar will go missing for good, is this possible?
Well, apparently the researchers did say the procedure of re-growing teeth could mean people
will never need root canals again, but growing the entire tooth has been problematic because
the laser thing didn’t grow back the enamel.
That’s the stuff that coats your teeth.
So, you can grow back the main part of the tooth, but the product won’t be finished.
Regeneration, said those scientists, is the next big thing.
The bad news, though, according to Dr Nigel Carter, the Chief Executive of the Oral Health
Foundation, is that the procedure is still a way off from being an everyday reality.
He did say, though, that it’s going to happen.
We will just have to wait a while.
It won’t be too long, and 22 rats in one study can tell you that because those little
animals got their mouths completely re-filled with teeth after getting the laser touch.
Scientists at the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Laboratory at Columbia University
Medical Center said that indeed teeth can be re-grown without using harvested stem cell
lines or by creating a new environment outside of the body.
In other words, all you need is that laser beam and in the rat study those guys got back
their teeth in just nine weeks.
This is what was written about those toothy rats, “In each of 22 rats, they implanted
an incisor scaffold orthotopically in mandibular incisor extraction pockets and a human molar
scaffold ectopically in the dorsum.
They then infused the scaffolds' microchannels with two growth factors.
They also implanted growth-factor–free control scaffolds.”
That might not mean much to you, but let’s just say that once gummy vermin were treated
to a new set of strong teeth.
Those researchers said this was a huge thing, because it’s the first time anything like
it has been done.
They also said it’s coming to humans, and in time is going to start saving people a
ton of money.
As many of you know, a couple of root canals and shiny crowns can be painful and also very
costly.
In fact, many people these days opt for something called medical tourism, which can mean travelling
halfway across the world to get their work done in a cheaper county.
Researchers in another paper said we might become like sharks.
In case you didn’t know, sharks are the most amazing tooth re-growers in the animal
world.
They might lose a tooth after struggling to tear apart a plastic 7-Up bottle they thought
was a tasty fish, but then another tooth will move in to replace it.
It’s as if they have a conveyor belt of teeth, said one researcher, and us humans
might well get the same thing too in time.
Scientists in China are also growing new teeth for animals, but it seems they threw a few
humans in the study and it worked for them, too.
We found this written about their research, “In a new study, Xuan et al. implanted ex
vivo expanded autologous tooth stem cells from deciduous teeth in two animal models
and in human patients.
They demonstrated regeneration of dental pulp containing an odontoblast layer, blood vessels,
and nerves in the implanted teeth and rescue of sensation to stimuli such as temperature.”
Again, that all sounds confusing, but what it really means is some animals and some people
got new teeth.
So there you go, many of you watching this might in the near future be treated to some
new teeth after you lose them.
More clinical trials have to be done, but from what we can see it’s going to happen.