Dr. Greg Davis: For WUKY News I’m Dr. Greg Davis on medicine. Dr. Jeff Ebersole is a Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at the college of Dentistry at the University of Kentucky as well as Director of the Center for Oral Health Research. Jeff, one of your major areas of Research is the fact that oral disease, diseases that involve the mouth are not limited to the oral cavity, can you expand on that a little bit?
Dr. Jeff Ebersole: I gave a presentation a few weeks back at the Deans Lecture in the College of Medicine and what I presented was the use of the non human primate or monkeys in these kind of studies and the reason being is that the oral cavity of monkeys is very similar to humans. The bacteria that live there are virtually identical, the way that the animal responds to this infection is very similar to humans and clinical disease the monkeys get periodontal disease, gum disease just like humans do and what we’ve been doing is working with a group, a baboon model, we worked with the South West Foundation for Biomedical Research, that’s a national primate research center in San Antonio where we can study pregnancy in baboons and actually identify the biology, the link between oral disease, gum disease, periodontal disease in the baboons and the preterm low birth weight incidents in the baboons, very similar using all the same methodology that we would use for humans.
Dr. Greg Davis: So a common pathway in all this would be the systemic inflammatory response that a human or a non human primate mounts against this oral disease?
Dr. Jeff Ebersole: Exactly this is a constant chronic infection and it is normal, there’s nothing abnormal, it is normal for the body to respond to that, it’s trying to control an infection in the mouth just like anywhere else. We believe that there’s a subset of the population likely with some genetic control where we’re not really sure of the details of that that make them more susceptible to the destruction, the tissue destruction and then the systemic infection associate with- with this gum disease. There’s lots of work being done to try to identify what those markers might be for that subset of the population, we believe that that also would exist in pregnant women as that subset of the population.
Dr. Greg Davis: So we have an interplay of systemic inflammation as well as genetics, predispositioned that individuals may have and of course in our state with such a challenge for oral health in our population, we could be dealing with both nature and nurture if you will?
Dr. Jeff Ebersole: Absolutely and as we investigated more closely the characteristics of expectant mothers which I can talk to more directly. In our population we have a whole range of behavioral issues, we sort of understand what the causes of dental disease are and we understand more now the ramifications of that. What we really have to work hard on is changing the behavior of the population so that they recognize the importance of oral health to their quality of life, to their overall health and when we started to talk to their pregnant moms about this link between their oral disease, which many of them quite honestly didn’t really care too much about because they had, you know, multi generation families with dentures, you know, early in life. But when we started to link that and do you understand what impact that might have on your developing baby and not on the short term, the acute aspects of that, but the long term impact of health on preterm low birth weight babies. It sort of lit a light bulb in them and all of a sudden you could see them start thinking about well this is important. We believe if we can convince expectant moms to improve their oral health and provide that care, that that’s going to have a long term effect on the way that their whole family’s respond and look at the importance of their oral health.
Dr. Greg Davis: Dr. Jeff Ebersole thank you very much for speaking with us today, for WUKY News, I’m Dr. Greg Davis.