Sidebar: Oral Health: Past, Present, and Future
In June 1948, President Harry Truman signed Public Law 755 that created the then National Institute of Dental Research, a national investment in oral health research. Six decades later, widespread fluoridation of our community water supplies still stands as a major public health breakthrough whose benefits have touched millions of Americans. Other key advances made possible by NIDCR support include the seminal discovery that dental caries, or tooth decay, is an infectious disease, as is periodontal, or gum disease.
The U.S. public has derived immeasurable benefits from these investments through improvements in dental health, but also in a wide array of health issues ranging from autoimmune disease to craniofacial birth defects to chronic orofacial pain to oral cancer.
What does the future hold for oral health? The investments we make today will create an exciting tomorrow for oral health prevention. Six decades from now, dentistry should be integrated into the primary health care network of the nation. Bioengineers will have succeeded in creating a lab-on-a-chip that will be placed on a small orthodontic bracket within the mouth. This powerful device will enable real-time surveillance of hundreds of biomarkers to signal the earliest moments of disease—not just oral health conditions, but those affecting the rest of the body.
Dental drills will be a thing of the past. Specialized biomaterials such as rinses and biological implants will prevent biofilm formation on teeth, thus averting tooth decay. Standard equipment in dental offices will include imaging devices that can scan for and spot any unusual sores inside a patient's mouth and even look for problems in other organs, through detection of sentinel molecules in saliva.
Disfiguring birth defects and traumatic injuries from accidents, war, or other violence will be repairable either through the use of small molecules that activate developmental pathways in stem cells within the body or through the use of tissue-engineered replacements. New approaches to treating chronic pain will erase the lost productivity that used to be typical for chronic conditions like temporomandibular muscle and joint disorders.
Dry mouth caused by the destruction of salivary gland tissues by autoimmune disease or cancer will not occur, thanks to gene-transfer or small-molecule therapies. Head and neck cancers will be rare, due to effective prevention methods or tests that detect disease at the earliest moment of inception.