Tooth Rings: Dental Enamel as a Chronological Biomonitor of Elemental Absorption from Pregnancy to Adolescence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Because the dental hard tissues commence development in the 13th week in utero and once formed are essentially inert, they may provide unique windows onto environmental and physiological changes during pregnancy and early life. We review the general potential of teeth as biomonitors and then the development of laser ablation-inductively coupled-plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to assess elemental absorption over temporal periods from a few days to years. In studies of exfoliated deciduous incisors of infants from Solis, Mexico (n=38), we found dramatic increases in lead and zinc from prenatal to postnatal enamel as well as strong correlations (∼ 0.5 to 0.9) between prenatal and postnatal enamel intensities of strontium barium, zinc, and lead. Prenatal enamel zinc is negatively correlated with dietary factors inhibiting absorption such as mothers' maize, phytate, and calcium intake during pregnancy. Prenatal enamel lead intensities, possibly from lead-glazed pottery, are inversely correlated with height (r=−0.53) and weight (r=−0.48) at ∼ 5 years. The combination of micro-spatial chemical methods such as LA-ICP-MS with the kymographic development of teeth illustrates the potential of enamel to monitor metal absorption and provide insights into the source, timing, and epidemiological consequences of early life pollution and nutrition.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".