People with severe gum disease may be twice as likely to have increased blood pressure

How teeth sense the cold

David Clapham, vice president and chief scientific officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in the United States and an international team of scientists have figured out how teeth sense the cold and pinpointed the molecular and cellular factors involved. In both mice and humans, tooth cells called odontoblasts contain cold-sensitive proteins that detect temperature drops, the team reports in the journal Science Advances.