Oral and Cardiometabolic Health: Insights from Biobanks and Large-Scale Epidemiologic Research

Oral diseases affect nearly half of the world’s population - roughly 3.7 billion people - according to the World Health Organisation, highlighting an urgent public health challenge. Over recent years, evidence has emerged linking oral health to cardiometabolic conditions, particularly cardiovascular disease and diabetes. However, our understanding of the complex, bidirectional relationship between these domains remains limited and underexplored. Biobank data offer a valuable, large-scale resource for advancing this field. With extensive participant data already collected, biobanks eliminate the need for labour-intensive new data collection, enabling investigators to examine oral and cardiometabolic health connections across diverse populations. Although oral health measures in biobanks are often less detailed than those in dedicated clinical studies, they nevertheless present unique opportunities to identify patterns and generate hypotheses. These initial findings can inform and prioritise areas for future, more granular research, ultimately supporting public health efforts to mitigate the burden of cardiometabolic diseases.This Research Topic encourages authors to address a key challenge, which is the limited availability of large-scale, integrated data sources that capture both oral health exposures and cardiometabolic outcomes. Recent advances in biobank infrastructure and the expansion of publicly available population-based databases now allow researchers to conduct robust secondary analyses on an unprecedented scale. We hope to identify current data resources, investigate possible mechanisms, and clarify how poor oral health may contribute to cardiometabolic disease risk, or vice versa. Harnessing these expansive data sources can generate new insights and inform targeted public health interventions.We welcome contributions in the form of original research, systematic reviews, reviews, mini reviews, perspectives, brief research reports, general commentaries, opinions, editorials, and study protocols that cover, but are not limited to, the following themes:• Original research leveraging large biobanks, public databases, or population-based cohort studies to examine the associations between oral health exposures with cardiometabolic health outcomes.• Reviews or perspectives aimed at identifying key directions or gaps in the current understanding of the oral-cardiometabolic health relationship.• Oral health measures may include dental procedural codes or self-reported tooth loss, gum disease, periodontitis, general oral health ratings, reports of trouble with gums or teeth, frequency of toothache, dental care utilisation, oral hygiene practices, use of dentures, etc. • Cardiometabolic health measures may include incident disease (e.g., cardiovascular disease, stroke, coronary heart disease, heart failure, peripheral artery disease, type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, hypertension, dyslipidemia, obesity, cardiovascular mortality) or cardiometabolic risk factors (e.g., blood pressure, insulin, glucose, cholesterol, inflammatory biomarkers, metabolomics, proteomics)• Protocols for new studies or resources that emphasise the collection of oral and cardiometabolic health data within biobanks or large population cohorts.Frontiers’ journals require that manuscripts primarily comprising computational studies of public data - such as bibliometric studies, NHANES studies, or studies utilizing the Global Burdens of Disease Database - must include appropriate validation. Manuscripts not adhering to these standards will not be considered. More information is available at this link: https://www.frontiersin.org/guidelines/policies-and-publication-ethics#standards-for-research-methodology Topic editors: Danielle Elizabeth Haslam, Sona Rivas-Tumanyan, Shilpa N Bhupathiraju Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/72255/oral-and-cardiometabolic-health-insights-from-biobanks-and-large-scale-epidemiologic-research