That camping trip your family still talks about? Science says it’s worth more than any toy under the tree.
New research shows that prenatal stress may influence bone and tooth development in babies, and accelerate the baby teething process.
The study, which was published in “Frontiers in Oral Health” on Nov. 17, involved 142 mothers in the United States who were pregnant between 2017 and 2022.
Researchers measured each mom’s hormones, including cortisol, in the late second and third trimesters.
The moms (and their babies) then returned to the University of Rochester’s Medical Center at one, two, four, six, 12, 18 and 24 months after birth to assess the eruption of each baby’s milk teeth.
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What they found was that women with higher levels of cortisol in their saliva during late pregnancy gave birth to babies who had a greater number of erupted baby teeth by the time they turned six months old.
Those babies had an average of four more milk teeth than those who were born to mothers with lower cortisol levels.
Dr. Ying Meng, a corresponding author of the study and associate professor at the School of Nursing of the University of Rochester, explains what she thinks is causing this difference.
“High maternal cortisol during late pregnancy may alter fetal growth and mineral metabolism, including the regulation of levels of calcium and vitamin D,” author Dr. Ying Meng said, per Neuroscience News.
Calcium and vitamin D are “both essential for mineralization of bone and teeth,” she added.
“Premature eruption of teeth could thus serve as an early warning sign of an infant’s compromised oral development and overall health, associated with socioeconomic deprivation and prenatal stress,” she said.
When do babies start teething?
Your baby’s first set of teeth — known as milk teeth — start developing in the womb at around six weeks gestation.
They continue to develop in the months after they’re born and eventually “erupt” beyond the gums by the time they turn six months old — though some babies can experience this eruption earlier or later.
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Most babies will develop a set of 20 milk teeth (10 in each jaw) before they fall out to make room for their set of 32 permanent teeth.
In the study outlined above, most babies had some teeth by six months and all babies had between three and 20 milk teeth by 18 months.
According to the Stead Family Children's Hospital, milk teeth serve three primary purposes: 1) they help children speak, 2) they help children chew and 3) they save space for the child's future adult teeth.
And while researchers have now found a link between prenatal stress and early baby teething, they’re now tasked with figuring out why it happens and what it means for the baby.
“We still have key questions that need answering,” Meng said, per the Neuroscience News.
“For example, which maternal hormones or downstream developmental pathways drive the change in the timing of tooth eruption, what the exact relationship is between accelerated eruption of teeth and biological aging and development, and what such speeding up says about a child’s general health,” she added.
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For now, Meng and her team are using the study as evidence that prenatal stress can speed up biological aging in children. Future research will help determine the extent of that evidence.
