Why can’t teeth repair itself when bones can even though they all belong to the same skeletal system?
In: Biology
Bones are alive. Every part of them has living cells that can do repairs. Tooth enamel doesn’t have living cells inside it. So the enamel can’t self repair. The inside of the tooth does, however.
Another thing to consider is that when a tooth is damaged, it usually loses material. If I remove a bone from your arm, it would not grow back.
Well, teeth aren’t bones, they’re not made of the same stuff. You don’t coat your bones with starchy and acidic food everyday. Your bones also have the luxury of being immersed in blood and healing factors, whereas your teeth are exposed and only supplied through a tiny root blood vessel. Finally, teeth actually do have some limited ability to repair themselves over time, but the modern diet is constantly degrading them faster than they can re-mineralize.
The internal parts of teeth can repair themselves, but the enamel cannot be repaired by the body. This is because of how enamel is made. Special cells called ameloblasts surround teeth before the erupt from the gums. These cells make enamel, but they do it from the interior of the tooth moving outward, and in the process lose their connection to the bloodstream and die – they live long enough to coat the developing tooth in enamel and then are absorbed by the body just as the teeth erupt from the gums. So there’s no more enamel making cells let after the teeth are visible. And even if there were, they’d have to be UNDER the existing enamel to get nutrients, meaning if they continued to make enamel our teeth would constantly grow and need to be filed down.
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