Lee Krahenbuhl's Blog Page: University of Buffalo Receives NIH Grand for Women’s Health

The University of Buffalo recently received a $4 million National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to look at the oral health of women that are postmenopausal. The study will begin an ongoing project to research oral microbiome and the chronic diseases of aging. They are particularly interested in studying postmenopausal women and whether or not there is evidence of oral microbiome and periodontitis in women of this age. This research received such a large grant because it is really operating on the cutting edge of technology in science. There is no knowledge of the link between composition and the role of oral microbiome in our mouths. More specifically, they are studying the microbiome of the subgingival (under the gums) area of the mouth and most specifically between the gums and the basal part of the crowns of your teeth. The hypothesis of the researchers is that particular compositions of the microbiome will be connected to periodontal disease prevalence and how severe and progressive the disease is over time. The University of Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, the University of Buffalo School of Dental Medicine, the University of Buffalo School of Public Health and Health Professions, and the University of Buffalo’s New York State Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, as well as the new Genomic Medicine Network will conduct the study. With all of these departments working together, the project is interdisciplinary and should tackle the questions from as many angles as possible to make great strides in dental health for post-menopausal women. The chief investigator is Dr. Jean Wactawski-Wende who states, “to our knowledge, there is no prospective epidemiologic study as large and rich with available data resources that can address the cutting-edge questions we propose here on the oral microbiome and its relationship to periodontitis in postmenopausal women. We expect our results to lay the foundation for the study of the association of the oral microbiome to the development of other chronic diseases of aging.”