What Is the Heritability of Periodontitis? A Systematic Review

Abstract

Background Heritability measures the ratio of the genetic component to the total phenotypic variance or, in other words, how much genetics can account for the difference in the distribution of disease seen in a population (Visscher et al. 2008). Therefore, this is a concept applied to a "population" rather than to specific individuals. Knowledge of disease heritability can help set boundaries on the potential of genetic variants to explain health and disease traits, inform genetic risk estimation, and estimate familial disease risk (Smith 1971). Heritability has traditionally been estimated by conducting twin or family studies with different analytic approaches (Tenesa and Haley 2013) and, more recently, by genome-wide association studies (GWASs). GWASs have been used to estimate the overall genetic contribution to physical characteristics (e.g., human height; Yang et al. 2010) and diseases (e.g., glioma; Kinnersley et al. 2015). However, most GWASs have sample sizes that allow them to effectively examine only common variants (>1% or 5% minor allele frequency), providing a lower bound for narrow-sense heritability (Kinnersley et al. 2015). The heritability of periodontal diseases, including gingivitis and periodontitis, was estimated in animal models (Miley et al. 2011; Hiyari et al. 2015) and in humans. Notably, studies of twins reported periodontitis heritability estimates that vary from around 0.3 to 0.5 (30% to 50%; Michalowicz, Aeppli, Virag, et al. 1991; Corey et al. 1993; Mucci et al. 2005). In contrast, other studies rejected the hypothesis of substantial heritability for periodontitis (Dowsett et al. 2002). Overall, there is still a high degree of uncertainty regarding how much of the observed variance in gingivitis and periodontitis is attributable to genetics. In the era of precision medicine (Divaris 2017), with a continuous effort to derive individual disease susceptibility assessments to inform prevention and 842510J DRXXX10.

Integration of genome‐wide association study and expression quantitative trait loci data identifies AIM2 as a risk gene of periodontitis

“…In addition to environmental factors, genetic factors also have pivotal role in periodontitis. The heritability of periodontitis is reported as high as 50% (Michalowicz et al, ; Nibali et al, ), indicating the essential role of genetic factors in this disease.…”

Antimicrobial and Substantivity Properties of Silver Nanoparticles against Oral Microbiomes Clinically Isolated from Young and Young-Adult Patients

“…Studies have considered that the oral microbiome belongs to biofilms through the oral cavity, producing an equilibrated ecosystem facilitating oral health; therefore, particular ecological disturbs allow that pathogens can start and develop diseases [2,4]. Two of the most prevalent and complex multifactorial oral diseases are dental caries and periodontal disease which are actually considered as serious public health problems among children, young, and adult subjects [5,6]. Dental caries is a chronic infectious disease characterized by the presence of small roughed surface or demineralized subsurface that progresses to cavitation of hard tissues (enamel and dentin) reaching the pulpal chamber and producing swelling, acute-chronic abscess, and particular systemic and oral symptoms mainly pain [7], while periodontal disease is presented as a chronic, inflammatory, and infectious disease that affects the teeth and surrounding tissues causing, in the most severe cases, excessive gingival bleeding and inflammation, increased dental mobility, and finally, tooth loss [8].…”

“…Many successful protocols for prevention and control of dental caries and the different stages of periodontal disease have been implemented [21][22][23]. However, the prevalence and incidence of these diseases in some countries have not significantly decreased [5,6,24], suggesting the exploration and application of new and novel antimicrobial agents that have the biomedical potential for the prevention and control of microorganisms involved. Nanotechnology has recently contributed to develop several antimicrobial agents with enough bactericidal properties for a wide number of biomedical applications [25,26].…”

Th2 cell regulatory and effector molecules single nucleotide polymorphisms and periodontitis

“…general, GWAS screened the whole genome for the disease associated genetic polymorphisms without a hypothesis, whereas candidate gene studies focus on some specific genes based on the potential biologic function/mechanism, such as Th2 regulation upon periodontitis in the current study. Theoretically, as a hypothesis-free approach, GWAS should be able to identify more disease associated genetic polymorphisms and reveal the heritability of the disease.However, compared to twins/family studies, GWAS on periodontitis detected a lower heritability estimate of 0.07 for combined definitions of periodontitis, increasing with disease severity 101. The atheoretical GWAS approach, until present moment, not able to capture all variation due to variable nucleotide tandem repeat polymorphisms (VNTRs), nor does it capture all variation due to copy number variations.…”