The tooth exposome in children's health research

The exposome concept proposes a comprehensive assessment of environmental exposures from the prenatal period onwards. However, determining exposure timing, especially over the prenatal period, is a major challenge in environmental epidemiologic studies.

For decades, teeth have been used to estimate long-term cumulative exposure to metals. Recently developed high-dimensional analytical methods, which combine sophisticated histological and chemical analysis to precisely sample tooth layers that correspond to specific life stages, have the potential to reconstruct the exposome in the second and third trimesters of prenatal development and during early childhood.

A retrospective temporal exposomic approach that precisely measures exposure intensity 'and timing' during prenatal and early childhood development would substantially aid epidemiologic investigations, particularly case-control studies of rare health outcomes.