ArticleBMC oral health2024
From teeth to brain: dental caries causally affects the cortical thickness of the banks of the superior temporal sulcus.
Article in BMC oral health, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 3 citations in OpenAlex.
- Interplay of depressive symptoms and clinical oral health conditions: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Brazilian oral research · 2026Pooled it
- Oral Diseases and Brain Pathologies: A Systematic Review with Narrative Synthesis of Clinical, Neuroimaging, and Mechanistic Evidence.Biomedicines · 2026Review
- Functional Chewing Gum Enriched with Spent Coffee Grounds Extract: Chemical Characteristics and Antimicrobial Potential Against Oral Bacteria.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Oral microbiota and central nervous system diseases: A review.Neuroprotection (Chichester, England) · 2025Review
- The Development of Methods of BLOTCHIPCurrent issues in molecular biology · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesDental caries is one of the most prevalent oral diseases and causes of tooth loss. Cross-sectional studies observed epidemiological associations between dental caries and brain degeneration disorders, while it is unknown whether dental caries causally affect the cerebral structures. This study tested whether genetically proxied DMFS (the sum of Decayed, Missing, and Filled tooth Surfaces) causally impacts the brain cortical structure using Mendelian randomization (MR).
methodsThe summary-level GWAS meta-analysis data from the GLIDE consortium were used for DMFS, including 26,792 participants. ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) consortium GWAS summary data of 51,665 patients were used for brain structure. This study estimated the causal effects of DMFS on the surface area (SA) and thickness (TH) of the global cortex and functional cortical regions accessed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Inverse-variance weighted (IVW) was used as the primary estimate, the MR pleiotropy residual sum and outlier (MR-PRESSO), the MR-Egger intercept test, and leave-one-out analyses were used to examine the potential horizontal pleiotropy.
resultsGenetically proxied DMFS decreases the TH of the banks of the superior temporal sulcus (BANSSTS) with or without global weighted (weighted, β = - 0.0277 mm, 95% CI: - 0.0470 mm to - 0.0085 mm, P = 0.0047; unweighted, β = - 0.0311 mm, 95% CI: - 0.0609 mm to - 0.0012 mm, P = 0.0412). The causal associations were robust in various sensitivity analyses.
conclusionsDental caries causally decrease the cerebral cortical thickness of the BANKSSTS, a cerebral cortical region crucial for language-related functions, and is the most affected brain region in Alzheimer's disease. This investigation provides the first evidence that dental caries causally affects brain structure, proving the existence of teeth-brain axes. This study also suggested that clinicians should highlight the causal effects of dental caries on brain disorders during the diagnosis and treatments, the cortical thickness of BANKSSTS is a promising diagnostic measurement for dental caries-related brain degeneration.
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