Early-life adversity affects nearly half of all youths in the United States and is a known risk factor for psychiatric disorders across the life course. One strategy to prevent mental illness may be to target interventions toward children who are exposed to adversity, particularly during sensitive periods when these adversities may have even more enduring effects. However, a major obstacle impeding progress in this area is the lack of tools to reliably and validly measure the existence and timing of early-life adversity. In this review, we summarize empirical work across dentistry, anthropology, and archaeology on human tooth development and discuss how teeth preserve a time-resolved record of our life experiences. Specifically, we articulate how teeth have been examined in these fields as biological fossils in which the history of an individual’s early-life experiences is permanently imprinted; this area of research is related to, but distinct from, studies of oral health. We then integrate these insights with knowledge about the role of psychosocial adversity in shaping psychopathology risk to present a working conceptual model, which proposes that teeth may be an understudied yet suggestive new tool to identify individuals at risk for mental health problems following early-life psychosocial stress exposure. We end by presenting a research agenda and discussion of future directions for rigorously testing this possibility and with a call to action for interdisciplinary research to meet the urgent need for new biomarkers of adversity and psychiatric outcomes.

中文翻译：

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牙齿作为衡量早年逆境和随后心理健康风险的潜在新工具：跨学科审查和概念模型


早年的逆境影响着美国近一半的青少年，并且是整个生命过程中精神疾病的已知危险因素。预防精神疾病的一种策略可能是针对遭受逆境的儿童进行干预，特别是在敏感时期，这些逆境可能会产生更持久的影响。然而，阻碍这一领域取得进展的一个主要障碍是缺乏可靠有效地衡量早期生活逆境的存在和时间的工具。在这篇综述中，我们总结了牙科、人类学和考古学有关人类牙齿发育的实证工作，并讨论了牙齿如何保存我们生活经历的时间分辨记录。具体来说，我们阐明了如何在这些领域将牙齿作为生物化石进行检查，其中个体早期生活经历的历史被永久印记；该研究领域与口腔健康研究相关但又不同。然后，我们将这些见解与关于心理社会逆境在塑造精神病理学风险中的作用的知识相结合，提出一个工作概念模型，该模型提出牙齿可能是一种尚未充分研究但具有启发性的新工具，用于识别早期心理社会后面临心理健康问题风险的个体。压力暴露。最后，我们提出了研究议程和对未来方向的讨论，以严格测试这种可能性，并呼吁采取跨学科研究行动，以满足逆境和精神病结果的新生物标志物的迫切需求。