A baby’s teeth will not be visible at birth. But believe it or not, they already exist beneath the gums. Children’s primary teeth begin to form at about the sixth week of pregnancy, and start building the bonelike inner tooth layer called dentin and the super-hard enamel layer that covers it around the third or fourth month of pregnancy.
Nutrition and oral health have an interdependent relationship – with one affecting the other. The teeth need certain nutrients to grow properly; certain nutrients are particularly important for bone and tooth development in children.
No doubt, the effect of nutritional status on the timing of milk and permanent tooth formation is not fully understood, but experts’ in a study said that there is a significant influence of nutrition on tooth formation in children, particularly those with malnutrition or that are overweight.
The experts tried to understand the direct relationship between weight and permanent tooth formation in 642 (270 males, 372 females) healthy Black South African participants aged between five and 20 years. It was in the 2020 edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
They were selected randomly from primary and secondary schools in Johannesburg during the Community Oral Health Outreach Programme (COHOP) by University of the Witwatersrand.
The teeth of these participants grouped into underweight/short for age, normal and overweight/obese/tall were assessed. Height, mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) of the left upper arm, head circumference and weight were measured.
The results of this study confirm a significant influence of nutritional status on the timing of tooth formation. In both males and females, being underweight is associated with a delay in the age of attainment of the final H dental developmental stage.
In addition, they found that height influences the timing of tooth formation, similar to what is seen for BMI. Unfortunately, the relationship with height could not be fully explored because of limited sample sizes at the extremes of height (tall for age and short for age) for both sexes.
A significant relationship between head circumference and tooth formation timing in females but not in males was reported and they suggested that this may be an indicator of a relationship between permanent tooth formation and brain growth. Professor Adebola Orimadegun, a consultant paediatrician, University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Oyo State stated that it had been established that the timing of tooth may be delayed in malnourished children.
According to him, “we do know that malnourished children may have some delay in tooth eruption but to what extent that nutrition affects it is not clear, but it is also one of the measures of milestones.
“So, children may generally have a global delay, those who for instance, suffer some form of birth asphyxia at birth may have delay because of neurological damage, the damage will ultimately affect so many other aspect of the child’s life and eruption of teeth may not be spared as well.”
Professor Morenike Folayan, a dentist at the department of Child dental health, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife corroborated that diet has an influence on the time of teeth eruption in babies.
According to her, “it is found that those that are very healthy, that are well-fed, in the high socio-economic class tend to erupt their teeth very early. We’re starting to see teeth in babies even as early as four months in children that were fed more, among the obese children. They tend to erupt earlier. But generally female erupts earlier than males both in the primary and permanent dentition.”
Meanwhile, studies also say that childhood diseases, infections, or insufficient energy, protein, or micronutrient intake are environmental stressors that could potentially alter the tooth eruption timing. These factors have synergistic effects as diseases and infections often suppress appetite or reduce absorption of nutrients—creating or augmenting existing malnutrition.
In Philippine, researchers in a study to determine whether there is a delay in the eruption of permanent teeth among Filipino adolescents with stunting or thinness also indicated that stunted and thin students had significantly fewer permanent teeth than their non-affected peers. These differences tend
to be the result of delay in tooth eruption in thin and stunted adolescents.
They declared in the journal, BioMedical Research International that thin and stunted boys had one tooth less than normal boys at this age. Impaired physical growth and dental development seem to have common risk factors.
The study which indicated the association between the nutritional status and the eruption of PT defined by the number of teeth included 1554 students aged 10 to 13 years.
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