Читать книгу Dental Neuroimaging - Chia-shu Lin - Страница 26

Instead of being a comprehensive textbook on the neurobiology of dentistry, this book aims to outline the ‘new engagement’ between dentistry and brain science, with neuroimaging as a critical approach to bridge the two fields. Here, we discuss the trend of cross‐disciplinary research between dentistry and brain science, according to two brief bibliometric surveys. Firstly, a survey based on PubMed was performed by the keywords ‘dental’ and ‘brain’ and the search was limited to titles and abstracts of the literature (tooth[mesh] OR oral[mesh] OR dental[mesh] OR dentistry[mesh] OR teeth[tiab] OR tooth[tiab] OR oral[tiab] OR dental[tiab] OR dentistry[tiab] AND brain[tiab]). The findings revealed that by December 2020, 20261 research papers had been documented in PubMed. The number of publications shows a pronounced rise in recent years, which almost doubled within 10 years. For example, between 1980 and 1989, the number of publications n = 1566. This number rose from 1990 to 1999 (n = 2684) and almost doubled from 2000 to 2009 (n = 4721). From 2010 to 2019, the number doubled again to n = 9331. As discussed in Section 1.2, the increasing number of publications on the brain topic corresponds to the increasing number of publications on neuroimaging, which has become a pivotal method in studying the human brain.

A second survey was conducted by searching for the past and current research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA, using the online platform of Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT) report. From 2020 to February 2021, the keywords ‘dental’ and ‘brain’ have led to 106 projects, with 39 projects funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR). This number is almost twice the number of sponsored projects (53) in the whole 1990s when the NIDCR funded 29 projects. The results suggest an increasing trend of cross‐disciplinary research between oral and brain sciences. Critically, not all the projects were granted by the NIDCR, which specializes in orofacial medicine. Several projects were supported by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Aging, highlighting the importance of oral issues in cognitive deficits and aging.