Abstract

Could kids' teeth help diagnose mental health issues? Dr. Erin Dunn, a social and psychiatric epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and her team are exploring new ways to help diagnose and treat mental health issues by focusing on children's teeth, 2News Oklahoma reported March 25. Dr. Dunn's latest study is centered around the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Dr. Dunn and her team are trying to find women who lived in the New England area and were pregnant or had already given birth when those terrorist attacks happened. Their hope is to see if the trauma of the marathon bombing left behind any kind of clues. As baby teeth form, they develop microscopic growth marks, almost like the rings of a tree. Researchers are hoping to analyze those teeth from around the time of the bombing. They're looking for things like enamel thickness or abnormalities, which could be signs of trauma. “The idea is that teeth might have these imprints that tell us about our early life history,” Dunn said. Her ultimate hope is that teeth could better predict kids' mental health issues later in life.

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