The new grant will be dedicated to enrolling pregnant African-American women in the COHRA project, which was previously limited to Caucasian women and their children. COHRA’s long-term goal is to design and implement preventive interventions for oral disease, particularly childhood caries, a bacterial infection that causes corrosion of a child’s teeth due to bacteria that is passed from his or her mother.
Both increased sugar intake and frequency of exposure can trigger a disease process that leads to caries. Additional factors associated with caries in children include genetic risk, household socioeconomic status, maternal caregiving behavior and stress, access to care and ethnicity.
“Through the ongoing work of the existing COHRA study, progress has been made in understanding many of these factors that lead to caries,” said Dr. Mary Marazita, CCDG director and principal investigator of the COHRA study. “However, much remains to be done to further characterize individual risk factors, and, just as importantly, to determine how interactions among them lead to oral health disparities.”
Protocols from the original grant will be followed in the new African-American cohort, adding a large, high-quality data set from an underrepresented population to the study’s existing data. The important influence of race as a factor in oral health disparities can then be added to the genetic, dietary, behavioral, microbiological, medical, and demographic factors already assessed in the study.
Oral disease remains a major health burden that affects some populations disproportionally, including communities in regions of Appalachia.
