#EnamelRepair #DentalHealth #ToothEnamel #RegrowingTeeth
Have you ever wondered why, despite all the hype around regrowing teeth, we still can’t repair our enamel? 🦷 It’s a question that seems to resurface every few years, only to fade away without any real progress. So, what’s the deal with enamel repair, and why is it so elusive? Let’s dive into the science behind it and explore what’s actually stopping us from fixing our teeth.
### The Enigma of Enamel Regrowth
It’s no secret that enamel is the hardest substance in the human body, but it’s also extremely delicate and prone to damage. Once enamel is lost, whether due to decay, erosion, or injury, our bodies can’t simply generate new enamel to replace it. This is because enamel doesn’t contain any living cells, making it incapable of self-repair like other tissues in our bodies.
### The Challenges of Enamel Repair
So, why can’t we just create new enamel outside the body and attach it to our teeth? 🧐 Well, it’s not that simple. Enamel is a complex structure made up of tightly packed mineral crystals, and recreating this intricate composition in a lab is no easy feat. Even if we could produce artificial enamel, attaching it to a tooth in a way that mimics the natural bonding process is a significant challenge.
### The Roadblocks to Tooth Enamel Repairs
One of the main obstacles to enamel repair is the lack of effective bonding agents that can securely attach new enamel to existing teeth. Current dental treatments, such as fillings and crowns, are effective at restoring tooth structure but fall short when it comes to regenerating enamel. Without a reliable method for bonding new enamel to teeth, achieving long-lasting repairs remains a distant goal.
### The Future of Enamel Restoration
While the prospect of regrowing enamel may seem like a distant dream, ongoing research in the field of dental materials and regenerative medicine offers hope for the future. Scientists are exploring innovative approaches, such as bioengineered enamel-like materials and stem cell-based therapies, to develop cutting-edge solutions for enamel repair.
### Closing Thoughts
So, how long will it really be before we see significant advancements in tooth enamel repairs for the average person? While there’s no definitive answer, the pace of scientific discovery suggests that breakthroughs may be on the horizon. In the meantime, maintaining good oral hygiene practices and seeking regular dental care remain crucial for preserving enamel and preventing further damage.
In conclusion, the quest for enamel repair is a complex and ongoing journey that requires patience, persistence, and innovation. While we may not have all the answers yet, the pursuit of healthier, stronger teeth continues to drive research and development in the field of dental science. 🚀💡
it can be done, there are foods that remineralize teeth. stop eating processed and junk food and start eating whole foods and your teeth will improve including oral bacteria that help in this
Nothing, hydroxyapatite does this.
The articles you see are about possibly triggering gene responses to cause people to grow new teeth, I think. A thing that we’ve done in rodents (which does not mean a lot).
I spend too much time researching these when they come out. They always either do very little addition a day (a glass of lemonade will undo years of repairs) and while work in the lab the taste & chemicals would kill you.
The enamel is the outer layer. This is fixed by putting artifical enamel on it. It used to be amalgam, now its composites.
What you need to repair a tooth is to repair the damage to the inside of your teeth, the biological matter. The cells, nerves, the goo. So far the only way to do this is root canal filling. Drilling out all the biological matter and replacing it with dead artificial material. The tooth is now dead and will decay.
Whenever you see some newspaper posting any scientific research, they do it to sell newspapers, not report facts. They dont understand it, and dont care, they write something and call it a day.
Research results are often crazy expensive and not reproducable large scale, but give us knowledge like building blocks to gain a better understanding of a problem and enables us to find better and cheaper solutions.
There are a lot of things that *look* like they are repairing teeth. First off, your body does some of it naturally; and there are a lot of things that can help that along.
The problem is making the repairs stick.
As a comparison, there have been a HUGE number of “art restoration” projects looked good for a year or two – before the aftereffects of the art restoration destroyed the art. The same thing happens in our mouth: a lot of the experimental procedures end up causing problems down the line.
Making new teeth is the same thing only worse: there’s a lot that is going on inside a tooth that helps them work – but if you don’t get it exact, there are a lot of problems. Which is why most of the time doctors make obviously fake teeth and just make things work.
In addition to the science, the bigger factor is the $$. Implants are enormous cash cows, like $5k to $10k per tooth in the US. They’re not covered by health insurance, so that’s pure cash without the hassle of dealing with insurance companies. I know several older people who have been quoted $50k for all their teeth (basically a permanent denture anchored by 4 implants). After the patients cries for a while the dentist says that they’ll knock $5k off if they pay in cash.
Unlike most tissues in your body, enamel doesn’t actually contain any living cells to repair itself, but instead it’s made out of a crystal called hydroxyapatite. These crystals can be found in nature but they are very brittle compared to your teeth, and tooth enamel is strong because of the way these crystals form on a microscopic level. Scientists haven’t figured out how to recreate this structure in a lab because it’s extremely complex, so any enamel grown in a lab will be weaker than a tooth. And even if scientists did discover how to make enamel, there’s also the problem of actually attaching it to the existing enamel on your teeth. It would basically have to be glued on, creating a weak point where the glue is that would break more easily than modern dental fillings
Getting something to regrow is step one.
Getting something that is regrowing to stop regrowing once it’s done is step 2, and much more difficult.
Making sure that something that is regrowing only regrows what you want it to regrow is step 3, and even more difficult than step two.
To understand why this is important, do a Google image search for “odontoma”.
Side note: researchers seldom hype up their discoveries. It’s usually a clueless journalist looking for clicks and wildly misinterpreting the results.
It’s fairly simple for a dentist to repair enamel, and allegedly, the dentin can heal just fine if you balance the microbiome of the mouth.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074340/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074340/)
But I’ve never had a dentist say these things.
“Can we not [generate new enamel] outside the body and ‘attach’ it?”
Growing human bone in a lab is probably possible, but much MUCH more expensive, and not necessarily better than the composite resins that dentists use to fill holes in enamel. And if you went to the extra time and expense to grow or aquire new enamel you’d just be attaching the lab-grown bone to the tooth with a resin glue anyway.
“…couldn’t [we] just make a mold of a tooth, make enamel over it, shape it right, and then just attach it somehow to the tooth”
This is very much a thing in dentistry, called a crown! They’re typically made of metal for strength, with a covering of resin or porcelain to make it tooth-colored. Again, we just use man-made materials that are easier to come by.
It’s like choosing the material for a countertop. Granite may be the “natural” option, but engineered stone doesn’t look or perform all that different. Plus, it’s quite a bit cheaper, and easier to produce locally.
Dentists here.
The cells that grow your teeth are hone once the secondary dentition is done.
Eli5 and mostly too far simplified but it helps understanding:
Think of a bell like structure of cells that start to produce a tooth under them. Think of it as a 3d printer. As the tooth grows, the printer will travel upwards to make space for the tooth. After the printer reaches the surface (your oral cavity), it has finished the crown. The root will grow and push out the crown while the printer moves sideways as it cannot travel into your oral cavity. it has to stay inside the tissue. Once the root is finished, the printer is disassembled and the parts (cells) differentiate into other cells that loose the ability to print a new tooth.
Basically that is why you can’t regrow teeth inside the body.
Maybe we will soon be able to grow teeth in a lab – but why? Our existing materials are already better, more durable and more resistant towards acid, wear and bacteria than your teeth.
The only problem is the successful integration in your body. The best dental implants have a 90-95% success rate and will survive for decades. However, your own tissue has a 99.9999% success rate. So you would always try to repair your own, already working teeth and only replace them when the replacement success rate and long term
survival expectation is better than the existing tooth.
Next thing: If we regrow a tooth in a lab, the root will have and odd shape. It may be oval or have more than one root. After a tooth gets lost, you would need to drill a hole into the jaw matching the new shape of the regrown tooth. Then it would all depend on the successful acceptance by your own body.
Same as with already available dental implants.
Next thing:
Teeth are not only thinks you chew with but they are sensors that are extremely precise. A tooth can feel the pressure of 1 gramm (lower incisor) while being able to endure the pressure of the weight of a washing machine when loaded within the desired direction.
This is possible because at the root of the tooth, there is a hole which allows a nerve and blood vessels to form living tissue inside the tooth. This is the structure that feels the tooth pain. This is called the pulp.
When a tooth is lost, this connection is lost. A lab-grown tooth will need to induce a new connection and will need to induce a new pulp. This is even more impossible because it would need to grow from below inside a hollow and 100% sterile structure.
So tl,dr:
Regrowing teeth makes no sense and while it is good to do research on this topic – unless we cannot regrow a tooth within the body; unless we cannot reactivate the 3d printer while keeping all other cells whithin normal parameters – it is not feasible and mostly marketing bullshit.