Researchers in the US have identified previously unrecognised changes in blood vessels that may help explain tissue destruction in oral disease
The study by a team at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, the VCU School of Dentistry and the University of Pennsylvania—and published Nature Communications—may also provide insights relevant to other inflammatory conditions, including cancer.
To conduct this study, the research team used and expanded a tool they created, the Human Periodontal Atlas—the leading periodontal atlas in the world—as part of the wider Human Cell Atlas, a single-cell atlas built from existing publicly available data sets, to examine RNA patterns across different cell types.
The study compared three oral inflammatory conditions—peri-implantitis, inflammation and tissue breakdown around dental implant; chronic periodontitis, and rapidly advancing periodontitis.
One of the major findings was that differences in bacterial burden alone did not explain why peri-implantitis and rapidly advancing periodontitis cause more severe tissue destruction. This suggested that changes in the body’s own tissue response may play an important role in disease progression.
The key similarity the researchers found was that CD38, a protein associated with inflammation, aging and cellular metabolism, was enriched in blood vessel cells in cases of rapidly progressing periodontitis and peri-implantitis.
By using spatial biology to compare these related diseases directly in human tissue, the team was able to identify a shared blood vessel pattern that may represent a drug-targetable mechanism of rapid tissue destruction.
“This hasn’t been described before in peri-implantitis,” co-first author Dr Quinn Easter said.
“This is a new mechanism that could potentially change the way this disease is thought about or even treated.”
