Touchy teeth linked to other sensitivities
Having extremely sensitive teeth can make eating ice cream and thorough toothbrushing a challenge. It also could be linked to heightened senses of hearing, smell or sight, a new study suggests.
Norman C. Bitter, author of the study, suspected that such sensitivities might be linked, so he asked 92 patients to rate their various sense perceptions. The 45 patients who had touchy teeth turned out to also be sensitive to sunlight. They all needed to wear sunglasses outdoors, compared with only eight of the 47 people who didn’t have especially sensitive teeth. Most in the hypersensitive group also rated themselves as very sensitive to sound, spices in food, smells and pain.
Although the mechanics of the various senses differ, Bitter believes that the common denominator is the fact that all nerves supplying the special sensory organs and the teeth arise from the same area of the developing embryo. The variations among people, he says, could be genetically determined.
Although more research is needed to confirm the sensitivity link, people who tend to avoid perfume, bright lights or itchy clothing could let their dentist know so proper precautions can be taken before treatment starts. “They may want to use a desensitizing toothpaste too,” says Bitter, formerly associate professor of clinical dentistry at USC School of Dentistry and now in private practice in Fresno.
The study was published in the November/December issue of the journal General Dentistry.
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Many parents unaware young kids are carrying too heavy a load
Despite a barrage of publicity about back injuries caused by heavy backpacks, most parents don’t know how much their young child’s backpack weighs, a survey has found.
The study focused on more than 700 younger students, from kindergarten to fifth grade, at three central Texas schools. Researchers weighed all the children’s packs and asked the 188 students who were hauling more than 10% of their body weight if their parents had ever checked their loads. Only seven parents had weighed their children’s packs; two-thirds hadn’t looked to see what was in them. Children whose parents had never checked their backpacks were most likely to be carrying the heaviest loads.
On average, the children with heavy packs were carrying about 14% of their body weight in textbooks, sports gear, lunch and personal items. “That’s about the point where kids begin to complain of pain,” says Bryan Lane, the lead author of the study and a family physician at the Scott & White Clinic in Temple, Texas.
The study appears in the December issue of the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
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Massaging babies may help improve sleep patterns
Gently massaging babies’ heads and backs for 30 minutes at bedtime not only relaxes them, it may help their developing body clocks get in sync with their moms’ sooner, new research suggests.
The study, done at Tel Aviv University and the University of Haifa in Israel, is the first time researchers have documented how massage affects production of the sleep-regulating hormone, melatonin, in infants. Twenty-one mothers volunteered for the intricate research project, in which the babies’ urine was collected periodically around the clock. Half of the mothers gave the newborns a bedtime massage for 14 evenings starting when they were 2 weeks old, and half handled their babies in the usual way.
By the time the massaged infants were 8 weeks old, their activity patterns more closely resembled their mothers’. They were most active early in the morning, between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m.; the infants in the control group were most active between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. At 3 months old, those babies massaged early in life produced more melatonin during the night than babies who weren’t massaged.
The study appears in the December issue of the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
