It seems as though every 2 or 3 years, some researchers publish an article and the news picks up on it and goes “Huzzah! We can regrow our teeth now!” and then it goes nowhere and fades into nothingness.
It got me thinking, what *is* stopping us from regrowing teeth? Is it the inability to generate new enamel? Can we not do that outside the body and ‘attach’ it? Or is there an issue with attaching it to the tooth? Cause if we can grow enamel (even though I’m not sure we can), it seems weird to me that we couldn’t just make a mold of a tooth, make enamel over it, shape it right, and then just attach it somehow to the tooth.
What is actually stopping us from doing this? Additionally, how long should it *really* be before we get proper tooth enamel repairs in the average joe?
In: Biology
It’s fairly simple for a dentist to repair enamel, and allegedly, the dentin can heal just fine if you balance the microbiome of the mouth.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074340/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074340/)
But I’ve never had a dentist say these things.
Nothing, hydroxyapatite does this.
The articles you see are about possibly triggering gene responses to cause people to grow new teeth, I think. A thing that we’ve done in rodents (which does not mean a lot).
There are a lot of things that *look* like they are repairing teeth. First off, your body does some of it naturally; and there are a lot of things that can help that along.
The problem is making the repairs stick.
As a comparison, there have been a HUGE number of “art restoration” projects looked good for a year or two – before the aftereffects of the art restoration destroyed the art. The same thing happens in our mouth: a lot of the experimental procedures end up causing problems down the line.
Making new teeth is the same thing only worse: there’s a lot that is going on inside a tooth that helps them work – but if you don’t get it exact, there are a lot of problems. Which is why most of the time doctors make obviously fake teeth and just make things work.
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