Childhood Obesity and Early Tooth Development in a Longitudinal Sample

Objectives: There are many health consequences of childhood obesity, including oral health impacts. Recent work has demonstrated a relationship between childhood obesity and early tooth eruption, which has been suggested to lead to a greater incidence of dental crowding. This in turn potentially leads to the increased caries burden documented in obese children. The limited work relating tooth eruption to obesity has largely focused on cross-sectional datasets, with few studies also including dental development (i.e., the actual development of the teeth in the jaws, in addition to the presence or absence of clinically erupted teeth).
Methods: In this study, we use a longitudinal dataset to examine the relationship between dental development and childhood BMI. We used a longitudinal sample of dental “bite-wing” radiographs from 80 children to estimate dental development using the Demirjian et al. (1973) method and used recorded height and weight data to estimate BMI.
Results: Our longitudinal data confirm the results of prior studies indicating that children with higher BMIs were more likely to have advanced dental development for their ages (p=0.005). Conversely, children with delayed dental development were more likely to have lower BMIs. Rate of dental development varied across growth. In general, the disparity between a child’s Chronological Age (CA) and their estimated Dental Age (DA) decreased from 4-8 years of age then increased from 8-12 years of age. What’s more, the median disparity between CA and DA was highest at age 12.
Conclusions: Our results suggest that the previously documented pattern of earlier tooth eruption in obese children is likely caused by advanced development. These results corroborate previous studies, building further evidence that relatively early dental eruption is another downstream consequence of childhood obesity. Further work is needed to determine the effects of this early eruption on occlusion and caries incidence.