The smoke leaves recognizable traces in the innermost heart of the teeth. It will be useful for forensic investigations and to reconstruct the habits of the past.
Smoking is a sworn enemy of the oral cavity, both from an aesthetic point of view (yellowish spots on the teeth, halitosis), and for health (gingivitis, increased risk of mouth cancer).
Now a study has found that The cigarettes leave, in the deepest and non -visible part of the teeth, a recognizable signature who can help understand if a person fumes currently or has smoked in the past, and even at what age. The discovery could have interesting implications for forensic sciences and archeology.
Accreette rings: in the teeth as in trees
A group of scientists from Northumbria University (United Kingdom) analyzed the dental cement of 88 teeth, or provided by living patients who had faced an extraction intervention or taken from skeletons of the period between the late 1700s and the late 1800s.
The dental cement It is a hard and thin tissue that covers the roots of the teeth, that is, the parts anchored to the bone. This fabric develops characteristic Accreette rings from year to year, as we age, not very different from the growth rings of the trees.
Scientists were studying him to understand if he could be used to trace the age of people and better identify the victims in forensic investigations. But while they analyzed it, they realized that the rings in the cement of some teeth had significant variations of thickness and regularity. These signs they were associated with smoking habit: they were found in the teeth of 70% of former smokers and 33% of current smokers, but only in 3% of the non -smoking teeth.
The teeth tell
The authors of the research thus understood that it was possible understand if a person was still, or had been, smoker only by the analysis of the teeth. While the dental cement of the current smokers was more subtle and damaged, that of the former smokers had a greater thickness on the rings once damaged. As if he had compensated the ancient damage leaving more conspicuous deposits where he needed.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect was that, by studying the rings in dental cement, scientists were able to trace with good precision to the period of time when the volunteers, or the people of the past, had smoked. For example, the damage present in the rings of the teeth of one of the donors in life seemed incurred in a period between 22 and 41 years old, and later the man said he had smoked between 28 and 38 years of age.
The smokers of the past
The latter detail could be important for archaeological studies. The team has collaborated with some scientists from the University of Leicester (United Kingdom) for the analysis of 18 teeth taken from skeletons dated between 1776 and 1890for 13 of which were known age, sex and date of death. The rings of the dental cement of the smokers of the past presented the same type of damage of that observed in current smokers, even when it was caused by the pipe tobacco.
The discovery could help to better identify the smokers of the past and to bind this habit, once much more connected to social status, at the age of death of those who smoked. So as to better understand How the tobacco smoke engraved on public health throughout history.
