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. 2025 Jun 13;13(1):140-153.
doi: 10.1093/emph/eoaf011. eCollection 2025.

Breastfeeding and parents' socioeconomic status buffer dental developmental stress in female infants

Emily Moes  1   2
Affiliations

Breastfeeding and parents' socioeconomic status buffer dental developmental stress in female infants

Emily Moes. Evol Med Public Health. .

Abstract

Background and objectives: Linking adult health to early life is limited by a lack of retrospective biomarkers of stress tied to narrow windows of early development. Teeth serve as ideal data sources to examine early life because their hard tissues endure from infancy through adulthood as permanent records of developmental stress. This study examines if dental fluctuating asymmetry (FA) in permanent molars, a measure of instability and plastic responses to stress, is associated with biocultural factors during development.

Methodology: Data were sourced from dental casts and health history records of 303 child participants of the longitudinal Burlington Growth Study. Dental FA was calculated from the first and second permanent molar intercuspal distances. Biocultural factors of parental, gestational, and childhood characteristics were grouped into latent dimensions using factor analysis of mixed data, then analyzed against FA using logistic regression separated by sex.

Results: Breastfeeding and high and low parental socioeconomic status were associated with lower FA in females. No relationships were found between biocultural factors and FA in males.

Conclusion and implications: The sex-specific results are likely due to differences in the nutritional needs of males and females during the first several postnatal months. Furthermore, dimorphism in energetic investment strategies, where males favor body growth while females favor system development, may be responsible for differences in how periods of physiological stress affect biological systems. These results argue for sex-specific investigations of stress biomarkers to better link early life with adult health.

Keywords: fluctuating asymmetry; growth investment; odontometrics; sex-specific.

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Conflict of interest statement

None declared.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Intercuspal distances measured on the maxillary and mandibular molars. Cusp numbers correspond to names: Maxillary: 1—protocone, 2—paracone, 3—metacone, 4—hypocone; Mandibular: 1—protoconulid, 2—metaconid, 3—hypoconid, 4—entoconid, 5—hypoconulid. Although first and second molars were examined for asymmetry, only first molars are depicted here.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Individual variable contributions to a) dimensions 1 and 2 and b) dimensions 3 and 4. Colors correspond to heat mapping of relative contributions, where variables closer to the right and top of each graph have higher percent contributions.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Highest contributing variables to dimensions 1–4 based on correlations for quantitative variables (left column) and categories for qualitative variables (right column). Panels a) and b) display variables for dimensions 1 and 2. Panels c) and d) display variables for dimensions 3 and 4. For correlation circles, the longer the vector arrow, the higher the correlation with the dimension(s). Relative contribution to each dimension also displayed as heat mapped colors.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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