dental health

(Newser) - The number of dentists graduating from dental school is plummeting just as the first generation of Americans with their full set of real teeth hit their golden years. And those graduates are much more likely now than in the past to be specialists in things like orthodontics and oral surgery....

(Newser) - Scientists have identified a link between gum disease and heart disease, the BBC reports, finding the same genetic variation in a group of patients with heart disease and a group with severe periodontitis. “Now we know for sure that there is a strong genetic link, patients with periodontitis should...

(Newser) - Scientists have identified a gene that grows tooth enamel and could be the missing link needed to grow teeth in labs—perhaps rendering fillings and dentures obsolete, the BBC reports. Researchers had already figured out how to grow the insides of animal teeth, but not enamel, which can’t grow...

(Newser) - Young children are developing more cavities in their baby teeth than kids were a decade ago, the CDC reported yesterday, a worrisome development that reverses a 40-year trend. Preschool children—"thousands and thousands of kids," in the words of one researcher—were the only age group in which...