Future of dentures is in fast decay

And now comes tooth regeneration: growing teeth in adults, on demand, to replace missing ones.

It turns out that wisdom teeth are prolific sources of the kind of adult stem cells needed to grow new teeth for you. From scratch. In your adult life, as you need them. In the near future. According to the National Institutes of Health.

For thousands of years, losing teeth has been a routine part of human aging. That's over. “We're there, right now,” says Pamela Robey, chief of the Craniofacial and Skeletal Diseases Branch at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, part of the NIH. “A lot of people will go and never lose a tooth. With good health care and proper habits, there's no reason to lose a tooth.”

The introduction of cavity-preventing fluoride into drinking water and toothpaste is viewed as one of the 10 greatest public health accomplishments of the 20th century, right up there with vaccinations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It did not occur without controversy. In the renowned 1964 black comedy “Dr. Strangelove,” Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) attacks the Soviet Union with nuclear-armed B-52s, hoping to thwart a Communist conspiracy to “sap and impurify” the American people with fluoridated water.

Leslie Seldin has some perspective on this. He graduated from dental school in 1966 and was the editor of “The Future of Dentistry,” a report published in 2001 by the American Dental Association.

“When I was growing up” — in the '50s — “reaching the teen years you'd develop enormous amounts of decay,” he says. It wasn't until the '60s, when most baby boomers were growing up, that fluoridation really started having a major impact. By the '90s, “if new patients came in that were young people, under 30, you really were surprised if you saw significant” cavities.

Fundamentally intact teeth, plus the increased attention paid to gum disease that can loosen them, have brought about a transformation.

“When I started out in dentistry, in my practice it wasn't uncommon for people losing their teeth — you took out all their teeth and made a denture. You were working on a denture at all times,” says Seldin. “Now, five new dentures a year, that's a lot. We go out of our way to avoid them.”

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