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After successful animal trials, human trials to begin for tooth regrowth drug
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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I'm surprised that mammals evolved to not regrow teeth. You'd think it would be a significant advantage.
I wouldn't imagine it'd play a role in reproducing though. It may help ones ability to live longer, but they have probably procreated long before tooth loss has become a major issue of well being or mortality.
It’s also only recently that we’ve been living for so long.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/longevity-throughout-history-2224054#toc-prehistoric-life-expectancy
this is misleading, the article starts by saying that life expectancy was 30-35 but then goes on to say that this is the average lifespan, which includes the fact that most people died in childhood.
When accounting for that, the average lifespan becomes at least 50 years old.
Most mammals instead evolved to have their teeth keep growing, like beavers, thus they need to keep using their teeth to keep them from growing out of control.
Secondly, humans in particular, added tooth-enamel-eating-bacteria into our diet hundreds of thousands of years ago. Before that, we didn't have a huge number of issues with our teeth, and so perhaps not enough time has actually passed since we got the bacteria eats our teeth for an evolutionary advantage that stops it from being an issue? Evolution isn't so cut and dry, it's not like it's trying to solve problems. People with resistances to mouth bacteria probably exist, but are they reproducing enough to become the dominant geneaology? Who the fuck knows?
They do exist, from memory they have another type of bacteria instead and there's even a project trying to transfer it from people with it to people without it.
Also as you said evolution doesn't try to fix stuff and there's a whole lot of stuff that could have evolved for the better (heck, we're not even that well adapted to be standing up!), but if it doesn't prevent reproduction then it gets passed down.
If I remember this study it required a formulated liquid for “feeding” the good bacteria that kept away the bad bacteria. Not sure what came of it.
Edit: not the same. Getting my studies mixed up. This is the one I was thinking of, it’s a mouthwash to get rid of destructive bacteria.
The one I'm thinking about was in trial in a bio engineering community somewhere in Latin America (easy way to get financing, get people to pay to be your guinea pig)
Found it!
https://www.luminaprobiotic.com/
Why can't we eliminate the bacteria?
That's like asking why we can't just eliminate gonorrhea... people keep inoculating each other with the bad shit.
I do tell my expecting parents (who happen to have bad teeth) that they should not test the food in their mouth and use the same spoon with their new child, as they will be passing on their bacteria to the kid. I do also imply they shouldn't share things like drinks.
Whether or not they listen to me isn't my problem...
It's everywhere. You'd have to sterilize the entire planet.
Because then dentists would go out of business! 🙃
we sort of can, it's called eating a better diet.
stop feeding the bacteria tons of sugar, start eating more chewy things that effectively brush your teeth as you eat them, and maybe even start chewing stuff like stalks of grass or twigs, that's how a lot of people keep their teeth clean even today.
I wish I was a beaver or a rat, so I could be gnawing on everything and it wasn't weird.
They last long enough if you only live to 35.
can we maybe not propagate misinformation? it was perfectly normal for hunter-gatherers to reach at least 50 years old, and if you think about it for a bit it makes sense that the age where we start to fall apart is about the oldest that people got to in the past, which is around 50-60 yrs.
the average lifespan in the past was something like 35, but that's because tons of people died early on, which remained true up until the invention of modern medicine which was like 100 years ago and doesn't really have anything to do with your diet.
Ah, my mistake. I was using the average age. Thanks.
For evolution to fix a problem that problem has to kill off everyone that isn't immune to it before they can breed. If that doesn't happen people with shitty teeth just keep getting born even if some have a mutation to regrow them.
Or at least space them out a bit. You get one set for the first 5-10 years, and then the second set has to last you the remaining 60-70.
Getting a new set at like 35-40 seems like a more sensible system to me.
Gotta be awkward at the office when Dave starts losing his baby teeth and has his midlife crisis at the same time
There didn’t used to be multivitamins. The broad spectrum of hominid diets never guaranteed you’d get enough trace minerals and elements to keep growing more teeth and there wasn’t evolutionary pressure to do so when you’re like five to ten years into your adult teeth when puberty hits.
mammal teeth work pretty well as long you don't eat too much sugar and acids.
Anthropologists can look at a pile of skeletons and tell if it's before or after processed sugar.
It's our modern diet of refined sugar and plenty more that harms teeth
It's somewhat within our control to do something about it
spoiler
asdfasfasfasfasThe redundancy is already there since we have 32 teeth to begin with. If you lose one or two it's not really a big deal.
And there's a fine line between helpful regrowth and cancer. the more regrowth there is, the more likelihood there is of cancer.
Haven't evolved yet.