For those of you who worry incessantly about what could happen if your child sustains a massive injury to the mouth through sports or a fall, recent clinical trials on stem cells extracted from children’s baby teeth bring good news. Researchers have discovered they can use stem cells from baby teeth to regrow the living tissue in children’s teeth damaged by injury. Perhaps this is a reason to hold on to those pearly whites!

Nearly half of children experience some kind of trauma to a tooth, and when this happens to a new permanent tooth, the damage can result in a tooth dying.

The clinical trial was run by Songtao Shi of the University of Pennsylvania and Yan Jin, Kun Xuan, and Bei Li of the Fourth Military Medicine University in Xi'an, China, and results of this trial were published in the Science Translational Medicine journal. Up until now, the treatments for damaged teeth were not able to replace lost tissue from injury, resulting in loss of sensation and abnormal root development. But, with this treatment, patients will actually regain sensation in their teeth and will have living teeth again.

This is just the first step in what they hope will result in treatment for even broader systemic diseases such as lupus.