Dietary and Metabolic Studies of Eskimo Children With and Without Dental Caries

Abstract

AND MARY SEGALL NEW YORK The hypothesis that systemic conditions are concerned in the causation of dental caries has led to studies of metabolic balances of calcium, phosphorus and nitrogen in an effort to determine whether differences in the utilization of these elements exist in groups of persons with and without caries. Boyd, Drain and Stearns 1 reported that a group of children without dental caries showed greater average retentions of calcium and phosphorus than a group with active decay, but no such difference was found for nitrogen. The results for calcium and phosphorus for a group of children with inactive caries were intermediate between those for the caries-free group and for the group with active caries. The retentions of calcium and phosphorus, and also of nitrogen, were markedly increased in a group of 7 children as active caries became inactive. It should be noted that a considerable number of the children investigated suffered from such metabolic disturbances as diabetes mellitus, late rickets, hyperparathyroidism, chronic acidosis and celiac disease. Koehne, Bunting and Morrell,2 on the other hand, were not able to correlate differences in retention of calcium, phosphorus and nitrogen with changes in susceptibility to caries in a group of girls on whom balance experiments were performed by Hubbell and Koehne.3 In the present study a comparison was made of the retentions of calcium, phosphorus and nitrogen of Eskimo children with and without dental decay. In the course of this investigation considerable information was obtained about the nature of Eskimo diet and the general nutritional status of the children. It appears that the only published balance study on Eskimos is that of Krogh and Krogh,4 who investigated the nitrogen balance of 4 adult natives of Greenland after the ingestion of large quantities of protein. The retentions were variable, the same subjects showing positive and negative balances on different days. More recently Heinbecker,5 Bertelsen,6 Rabinowitch and his associates,