Expanding Perspectives

In this International Association for Dental Research (IADR) centennial year, we are reminded that dental research has undergone many changes in methodologies, analytics, and technologies over the past 100 y. We have also moved beyond a focus on biomedical factors toward multidimensional considerations of sociodemographic and cultural factors as determinants of health and disease. Furthermore, we now also aim to translate what we learn from research into policies and programs that will improve health for large populations, implementing them and assessing their effectiveness. Generating ideas and problem solving has become more and more important in this process. Many of us who have lived through some of the latest changes have attained a broader perspective of the health sciences and are now able to visualize the role of various types of research and how they fit together into a vast overarching framework. We want to impart that important information to our research trainees to give them an understanding of where their research fits into the grand scheme, with the ultimate goal of improving population health. This will enable our students to think more broadly about their own hypotheses and the links that their research could have with other disciplines to further explore issues that we have yet been unable to resolve within our own individual disciplinary approaches. This general understanding promotes broad thinking and further fosters translational research ideas. This concept has recently been addressed in Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (2019), a book that promotes the importance of gaining broad, general knowledge and experience prior to focusing in on detailed, specialized training. When we recruit students, do we choose those with backgrounds in our own disciplines over those who have experience in other areas? Inadvertently, we may be reducing the potential to move research forward into new collaborations and discoveries. Broad knowledge furthers analytical thinking that allows one to work through unfamiliar problems in unfamiliar contexts. All of us can broaden our knowledge by reading reports outside of our own domains. In this issue, Ravaghi et al. (2020) describe their very interesting findings. They tested the hypothesis that access to dental care would result in a decreased incidence of childhood caries in the United Kingdom. They found that while low-income children accessed and received similar care in the dental clinics as children who were more advantaged, their incidence of caries remained higher than that of the advantaged children. Thus, the authors concluded that access to dental care alone does not adequately address inequalities in the dental caries experience. The authors suggest that other factors (e.g., sugar intake and lack of fluoride in low-income populations) may be responsible for these results. Meyer et al. (2020) also studied children in the United States who were treated in physician-provided oral health services (POHS) and compared them with those who did not receive POHS. They found that the children who received POHS required significantly fewer treatments involving general anesthesia (GA) than those who did not have POHS. They also measured costs, reporting that the costs for the POHS children were significantly lower than for the other group, mainly due to the reduced number of GAs. Considering the oral microbiome, Philip et al. (2020) carried out a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in which standard fluoride toothpaste was compared to 2 pastes, one made up of phosphopeptideamorphous calcium phosphate (CPP-ACP) and the other made of CPP-ACP with added polyphenol-rich cranberry extract. Both test pastes performed better in reducing cariogenic bacteria over the standard fluoride toothpaste, and each reduced different types of bacteria. Thus, the JCTXXX10.1177/2380084420909134JDR Clinical & Translational ResearchExpanding Perspectives research-article2020