University of Md. Dental School Praised for Bringing Oral Health Research Home

Basic dental science often helps ease health disparities, a panel of leading oral health experts said at the first town hall meeting of the Friends of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (FNIDCR), held at the University of Maryland Dental School on April 25.

The event - Bringing Oral Health Research Home - featured speaker Isabel Garcia, DDS, MPH, acting director of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR).

“For the majority of the infectious dental diseases, we know how to prevent them,” Garcia said. “We know their cost to health. Now, affecting behavior change, to enable people to do the right thing, is needed to get people healthier.”

Jay A. Perman, MD, president of the University of Maryland in Baltimore and a practicing pediatric gastroenterologist, said, “Those of us who are engaged in health care are deeply troubled, and may I say, embarrassed, by the inequities and inequalities that are based on background, on gender, on race, and on social status.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, disparities according to patients’ race, ethnicity, gender, income, and disability exist regarding how frequently the patients get sick and how often the disease causes death.

Christian S. Stohler, DMD, DrMedDent, dean of the Dental School, introduced three faculty scientists from the School who illustrated how their current laboratory research is positioned to help reduce health disparities.

Huakun Xu, PhD, MS, professor and director of the Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering Division, talked about the use of nanotechnology compounds to prevent cavities; Ronald Dubner, PhD, DDS, professor, addressed new understanding of persistent head and jaw pain; and Mary Ann Rizk, PhD, assistant professor, spoke about microbial “biofilms” in the oral cavity.

“This isn’t esoteric basic microbiology,” Garcia said after the meeting, “Just like Dr. Rizk explained, we are beginning to understand all the bugs in the oral community - the microbiom as we call it - and the interaction with one another.”

Garcia said NIDCR funds research to create new tools and approaches to improve health. An NIDCR-funded team, she said, recently used molecular biology to implicate for the first time a bacterium, Scardovia wiggsiae, in severe cases of early childhood caries.

“That is an example of a tangible finding that might provide avenues for better identification of problems,” she said. “We knew it was in the oral cavity but it was never implicated as a pathogen. The reason we were able to identify it is that we have better tools and better technology to identify [pathogens].”

Another example of research impacting patients quickly, Garcia said, is NIDCR-funded research in California demonstrating that it is “highly efficacious to use fluoride varnish once or twice yearly on very young children.” The study is credited with changing the reimbursement for physicians to apply fluoride varnish in “many, many states across the country.”