Teeth And Hormones

Teeth And Hormones by Jane Thurnell-Read

2005 July

An interesting study is about to be performed on using the hormone relaxin to help move teeth.

University of Florida researchers are testing the power of the hormone biochemically to move teeth faster and less painfully during orthodontic treatment.

Relaxin is the hormone that helps women's pelvic ligaments stretch in preparation for giving birth. It does this by softening collagen and elastin in the tissues.

Researchers will evaluate whether injecting relaxin into the gums will loosen the collagen and elastin fibres and reorganise them so teeth can move more freely into orthodontic alignment. Once the teeth have been moved, researchers will administer another injection of relaxin in the hope that it will further soften gum tissue fibres, preventing them from pulling teeth back into their original position. This could dramatically reduce the amount of time that teeth braces are needed, and make the whole procedure less painful.

Reading about this project set me thinking about how little we know about hormones, and their role in the body. The fact that this research is being undertaken is presumably because all collagen and elastin tissues share the ability to be affected by this hormone, not just the ones involved in giving birth. Yet medical text books usually only list the role of relaxin in child birth.

When I was a kinesiology practitioner I often found that the body was asking me to do work that didn't make sense in conventional medical terms, (or at least in terms of my understanding of it!) Sometimes I subsequently learnt of new or existing research that threw light on why I had done something, but sometimes that was never clear. This does not mean what I did was wrong - just that the intellectual understanding wasn't there (yet).

At the end of the day the important thing is that people get well, even when we don't understand why.