Dental News - History of vitamin D deficiency hidden just under the enamel

Dental Tribune International

Thu. 1. June 2017

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ONTARIO, Canada: With over a billion people worldwide estimated to be affected, vitamin D deficiency has long been a topic of discussion among health professionals and is now recognized as one of the most important indicators of overall heath.

Researchers have found that mineralization defects in teeth, interglobular dentin, provide a new means of investigating past episodes of vitamin D deficiency. Using this method, a study has shown that some of the earliest Middle Eastern and European communities were affected by this deficiency, but levels and severity appear to have increased over time.

In 2016, researchers from McMaster University in Ontario, in collaboration with colleagues from Quebec and France, first established that dentin can carry a permanent record of vitamin D deficiency. Unlike bone, dentin is not remodeled, and this means that interglobular dentin provides a precise tool by which to explore evolutionary aspects of vitamin D deficiency, according to the present study.

Using three previous reports on interglobular dentin in humans, in addition to their own research, the scientists determined that the earliest evidence of vitamin D deficiency comes from Tabun and Skhul, the late Pleistocene sites at Mount Carmel, Israel. This finding provides evidence that vitamin D deficiency has been present since very early times and is not just an issue faced currently. Additionally, teeth from Helladic and contemporary Greece revealed not only that more people had interglobular dentin but also that the severity of defects had increased. On a simple comparative scale, severity of deficiency was four times as high in Greek communities in 1948 ce as in early farming communities from circa 2000 bce.

“This is exciting because we now have a proven resource that could finally bring definitive answers to fundamental questions about the early movements and conditions of human populations—and new information about the importance of vitamin D for modern populations,” said McMaster anthropologist Prof. Megan Brickley, lead author of the paper and Canada Research Chair in Bioarchaeology of Human Disease.

Prior to this discovery, there had been no reliable method by which to measure vitamin D deficiency over time. Using examples from ancient and modern teeth, the researchers have shown just how valuable the method is for understanding a health condition that affects so many people throughout the world. Results from a 2012–13 Canadian Health Measures Survey showed that 25 percent of Canadians were at potential risk of inadequate vitamin D intake and 10 percent were at risk of vitamin D deficiency.

The paper, titled “Ancient vitamin D deficiency: Long-term trends,” was published online on May 18 in the Current Anthropology journal.