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Review
. 2025 Apr 30:18:5867-5879.
doi: 10.2147/JIR.S516502. eCollection 2025.

Pyroptosis in Pulpitis

Xiaorui Wei  1 , Shidian Ran  1 , Xingrui Yan  1 , Jindie Huang  1 , Linyu Xue  1 , Tong-Chuan He  2   3 , Hongmei Zhang  1 , Si Wu  1
Affiliations
Review

Pyroptosis in Pulpitis

Xiaorui Wei et al. J Inflamm Res. .

Abstract

Pulpitis is an inflammatory disease occurs in the pulp tissues. Continuous development of pulpitis can lead to apical periodontitis and seriously damage the function of teeth, affecting the oral health and daily life of patients. Pyroptosis, alternatively termed inflammatory necrosis, is a type of programmed cell death that is characterized by the swelling of cells until the cell membrane is broken. The GSDM family of proteins can be activated by a variety of pathways, which can lead to the puncture of cell membrane, inducing the release of cellular contents and inflammatory cytokines like IL-1β and IL-18 to activate a strong inflammatory response. Pyroptosis in dental pulp may be an important direction to find new targets for pulpal inflammation prevention and treatment, which deserves further study. In this article, we reviewed the activation mechanism and potential role of pyroptosis in the progression of pulpitis, along with the interaction between pyroptosis and other regulated cell death (RCD) pathways. This review aims to enrich the mechanism under the development of dental pulp inflammation, and to uncover potential therapeutic targets for early alleviation and treatment of pulp inflammation.

Keywords: dental pulp cells; pulpitis; pyroptosis.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Pyroptosis in dental pulp tissues. Pyroptosis has been demonstrated to occur in HDPCs, HDPFs and mDPC6T. Early and moderate pyroptosis in favor of rapid response to bacterial infection, whereas dysregulation of the inflammatory response induced by hyperactivated pyroptosis may be associated with the irreversible pulpitis. Figure 1 was independently designed by the authors using Microsoft PowerPoint 2019, with all elements created using native software features.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Intercellular mitochondrial transfer alleviates pyroptosis in dental pulp. The pyroptotic mDPC6T secreted TNF-α and promoted the formation of tunnelling nanotubes (TNT) in mBMSCs via NF-κB signaling, thereby reducing the pyroptosis initiated by mitochondrial dysfunction and NLRP3 inflammasome in mDPC6T cells. Created in BioRender. Zhang, X. (2025) https://BioRender.com/0dn3cjf.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Functional overlap of apoptotic, autophagic, and necroptotic proteins with pyroptotic proteins. (A) Autophagy and pyroptosis. (B) Necroptosis and pyroptosis. (C) Apoptosis and pyroptosis. Created in BioRender. Tu, D. (2025) https://BioRender.com/gmxfo36.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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