ABOUT US

At the Dunn Lab, we are collecting and analyzing exfoliated primary teeth (also known as baby or milk teeth) to learn if and how teeth might record information about a child’s early life experiences, during pre- and perinatal life.

Our research team comes from multiple disciplines. You can read more about our dental collaborators on the Dunn Lab’s website.

We've written about the potential of teeth to show signs of stress and mental health issues (Biological Psychiatry), and we've conducted studies that link certain mental health factors during pregnancy to changes in tooth growth (JAMA Network Open). Our work has also found links between tooth shape (Frontiers in Dental Medicine) and children's mental health and weight gain (Communications Medicine). We're also studying how teeth can hold clues about the stress hormone cortisol (Intl Journal of Paleopathology). To help kids and families learn about our research, we even created a children's book called The Science Tooth Fairy and published a paper about the cultural diversity of how people dispose of exfoliated teeth (Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology).

Our tooth studies have been funded by the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health at Mass General, a multidisciplinary center focused on promoting brain health across the lifespan through preventive brain care, and Mass General Neuroscience as well as the National Institute of Mental Health.

To learn more about our studies, please email Dr. Erin Dunn