Oral Pathology of Rhesus Macaque Families From Cayo Santiago

Objectives: Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) among primates are close genetic relatives of humans. They have similar dentition and pathologies to those of developing and aging humans. Thus, they are proposed as excellent translational models over other animal species for exploring aspects of oral health and disease. In this study, the health status of teeth and jawbones were investigated in the skeletons of rhesus macaques from Cayo Santiago Island in Puerto Rico.
Methods: Specimens included 617 adult individuals, aged 8 to 31 years, from 17 matrilines with family sizes ranging from 6 to 84. Oral health screening variables included caries, antemortem tooth loss, periostitis of alveolar bone, periapical abscesses, severe temporomandibular joint osteoarthritis, and others.
Results: Rhesus macaques had restively low dental pathologies such as caries, yet alveolar bone pathologies were common. Some families had a relatively higher prevalence of alveolar bone pathologies than others, while some families generally had low prevalence of all oral disease measures, indicating a familial relationship in susceptibility to oral disease. In addition, the prevalence of oral pathologies were not correlated with age, indicating an early onset of mucoso-osteopathies in some families. The results of this survey suggest the common existence of mucosa-alveolar bone pathologies in rhesus macaques as seen in humans with a distribution consistent with familial inheritance.
Conclusions: Further assessments of the role played by familial effects on oral health and disease are warranted to establish models for more specialized and advanced studies such as quantitative trait loci studies to identify chromosomal regions in families that influence oral and overall family and population health. A better understanding of these conditions is a necessary precursor to prevent and/or curing these diseases in the human population.