The Tooth Fairy Project: Baby Teeth as Biological 'Hard Drives' for Stress Research Over the Lifespan [Seed Funding]

Research into the effect of exposure to maternal stress during pregnancy on child developmental outcomes can take years to collect. We propose an innovative solution for this problem: using deciduous teeth (baby teeth) biomarkers as an alternative indicator for maternal stress exposure.

Deciduous teeth, hidden in the gum of a developing fetus, can be seen as biological hard drives: they “store” exposure data from the 14 th week of pregnancy onwards. Recent developments in quantitative molecular imaging have made it possible to use them to identify prenatal and postnatal stress marker. While this novel discovery offers a non-invasive, direct measure of maternal stress exposure during pregnancy (intensity and timing), assessing stress markers in deciduous teeth have yet to be validated in-depth. And that is what we focus on in this project: Identifying a teeth biomarker of maternal stress during pregnancy by retrospectively examining deciduous teeth that have been shed in early childhood (between the ages of 6 to 12). Using teeth biomarkers as alternative indicator for maternal stress enables the identification of critical periods of maternal stressors that influence healthy lifespan trajectories. As such, this project is an important steppingstone for relevant research into the effect of maternal stress on child development outcomes.

Team Composition

• Dr. Marion I. van den Heuvel (CNP) is an expert in early neurobiological influences of early child development. She examines how these prenatal and early life influences (e.g., maternal prenatal stress and anxiety) can impact brain development. Van den Heuvel has experience with deciduous teeth research in the PELS study for which she is the principal investigator.
• Dr. Myrthe Boekhorst (MCP) studies psychological maternal wellbeing during pregnancy (e.g., stress, depression, mindfulness). Boekhorst has extensive experience in large-scale data collection and implementation. She is the current project coordinator of the Brabant Study, a large population-cohort of mothers and their children who are followed from pregnancy onwards.
• Dr. Inga Schwabe (MTO) is an expert in the field of longitudinal data analyses and statistical genetics. She has extensive experience in analyzing large datasets using a broad range of statistical analyses, including large genetically informative data such as inflammatory biomarkers.