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WSU professor travels to Himalayas for dental research

Professor studying cleft lips, palates in remote population in Nepal.

Richard Sherwood, director of the Lifespan Health Research Center of Wright State University's Boonshoft School of Medicine, is researching the genetic causes of facial deformities by analyzing a sample of dental casts he continues to collects from people living in Jiri, Nepal.

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Chris Stewart/Dayton Daily News Staff Photogra Richard Sherwood, director of the Lifespan Health Research Center of Wright State University's Boonshoft School of Medicine, is researching the genetic causes of facial deformities by analyzing a sample of dental casts he continues to collect from people living in Jiri, Nepal.

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By Ben Sutherly, Staff Writer Updated 8:50 PM Saturday, April 30, 2011

KETTERING — A Wright State University professor is seeking the genetic roots of some of humankind’s most common birth defects — cleft lips and palates — among a remote people in Nepal’s Himalayan mountains.

Some 40 miles from the base camp for Mount Everest climbing expeditions, Richard Sherwood is collecting impressions of the teeth of the remote Jirel people. He’s no dentist; the work is part of research into the root causes of craniofacial deformities.

While cleft lips and palates don’t seem any more common in the remote Himalayan people, the Jirel are an appealing study group for Sherwood. Unlike U.S. citizens, they’ve had little orthodontic work.

“That’s important for this kind of study because you want to look at natural variation,” Sherwood said.

And researchers have mapped the local people’s ancestry, which dates back 11 generations to a founding population, he said. Such research is costly. The National Institutes of Health released $2.84 million for the research, thanks to passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

“Funding is hard to get these days so you try to look at something that’s going to get you the most bang for the buck,” Sherwood said.

He hopes to collect impressions of the teeth of 1,500 people at a dental clinic in the town of Jiri. He’s bringing those impressions, 350 at a time, in metal trunks back to Wright State University’s Lifespan Health Research Center, which he directs, on Research Boulevard in Kettering.

There, the impressions of tens of thousands of teeth will be scanned and measured using an automated system developed by Mathew Thomas, a graduate student of Julie Skipper, a research associate professor with the Wright State Research Institute.

Sherwood is looking for asymmetries in the development of the human palate, which develops in the womb much as lips do. Normally, the palate forms in two halves, facing downward and then gradually rotating upward and fusing together. Cleft palates typically occur when one side doesn’t follow that normal development.

The project also could provide new insights on dental crowding, which is a problem in the United States and worldwide. It’s to blame for everything from unattractive smiles to cavities and infections.

“People have said that very soft American diet (of processed food) has resulted in smaller jaws, while teeth have stayed the same size,” Sherwood said. “I’m not sure I entirely buy that theory, but ... it’s true there’s a problem with dental crowding worldwide.”

Sherwood plans to finish his field work in 2012. If he can secure more grant money, he then hopes to map variations in palate traits in search of areas on a human chromosome that are responsible for influencing that trait.

“The big money will be if you can identify a novel gene that nobody’s ever heard of that nobody knew had anything to do with teeth and jaws,” Sherwood said. The chances of that happening are slim but plausible, he said.

Wright State’s Lifespan Health Research Center studies the changes that happen to people over the course of their lives. It’s home to the Fels Longitudinal Study, billed by the university as the world’s largest and longest running study on human growth and body composition.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7457 or bsutherly@Dayton

DailyNews.com.

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