Milk teeth generally appear around the age of 6 months, or even before at 3 months, and begin to fall at the age of 6 years. To encourage children to remove them and not be afraid to lose them, parents often offer them gifts or money that they put under their pillows and recover the tooth that has fallen. The next day, the children know that the little mouse is passed when they find nothing. But what do parents do with the milk teeth of their children? What if these teeth could save their lives?
To remove the milk teeth, each family has its own ritual; The doorknob method (not recommended because painful), apples to be chewed, the methods of distraction which consist in telling a story to the child while hooking a thread to its tooth. Once he follows the story carefully, it is necessary to pull the tooth with a blow.
Once the tooth is in its hands, what can we do with it? There, too, there are many rituals and traditions. If some of them throw it in the sun to have pretty definitive teeth, others put it under the pillow and wait for the passage of the little mouse that will leave them money or a gift.
Generally, parents throw milk teeth or can keep them in jars, to preserve them as a childhood memory. But if you are told that milk teeth can save your child's life? We explain everything.
A revolutionary discovery:
According to Professor Sara Rankin, a biologist at Imperial College London, milk teeth can really help save the child's life and even when he becomes an adult.
Indeed, milk teeth contain stem cells that can proliferate and be exploited to fight many diseases. Today, these cells are used to treat cancer, including leukemia, blood diseases and there are even clinical trials that evaluate the possibility of repairing heart tissue after a heart attack, Using these cells.
It was Songtao Shi, a dentist at the US National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who first made the connection between stem cells and milk teeth. In 2000, he discovered that the pulp of wisdom teeth contains stem cells.
When her 6-year-old daughter and her friends started to lose their milk teeth, he decided to analyze them too. He asked them to put the tooth in a glass of milk for a whole night. After breaking the tooth and removed the pulp, he found between 12 and 20 of the existing cells were stem cells!
Milk teeth are therefore a true source of stem cells, which can be exploited in different ways in the field of medicine. Stem cells in milk teeth are more proliferative, even if you get fewer stem cells, they end up multiplying rapidly.
Research and scientific studies on this subject are continuing. Scientists hope that in the future, stem cells extracted from milk teeth can be used to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or even diabetes, arthritis and vision problems. They can also be used to grow new teeth, thus providing a more natural alternative to dentures and implants.
The milk teeth are a true glimmer of hope in the world of medicine! Clinical trials are conducted in all four corners of the world and all have positive results. In Mexico, a surgeon used a stem cell implant, derived from stem cells extracted from a patient's wisdom tooth, to regenerate bone tissue in his cheek.
To raise awareness of the importance of preserving her teeth, many awareness campaigns have been launched. Today, there are even banks, including two in England, where it is possible to conserve its milk teeth under the best conditions in order to exploit them.