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Objectives: Bibliometric analysis is one of the most widely used tools to quantify the research prolificacy in a specific area of knowledge. This paper aims to provide a list of the top 100 cited articles published between 2010 and 2021 on dental fluorosis to offer an up-to-date quantitative-qualitative analysis of publications. Methods: The Scopus database was reviewed with the term "dental fluorosis" in the title, abstract, and keywords to retrieve lists of the 100 most-cited articles on 16 December 2021. The number of citations, authors, publication year, country, and institution of origin were evaluated. A graphical illustration of keywords, co-authors, and countries was created using VOSviewer. Results: The number of citations of the 100 articles varied from 654 to 42. All the studies were published in English and 62% were published in journals in the first quartile. The articles were published in 62 different journals, with the most popular publication being the Journal of the American Dentistry and Science of The Total Environment (n=5). The papers originated from 40 countries, with India (n=26) accounting for the largest number. The most prolific authors were A. M. Glenny and H.V. Worthington (n=5), and the institution was Manchester University (n=8). The majority of articles were on Environmental Science (n=39), followed by Dentistry and Medicine (n=26). Conclusions: The present citation analysis provides insights into the current publications in dental fluorosis and will help researchers interested in this topic by saving considerable effort and time in finding appropriate article referrals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tributes by Masashi Tsunoda, Japan, and Arjun Khandare, India, to Kenji Akiniwa, DDS. Tsunoda noted that Akiniwai was a dentist and key member of the Japanese Society of Fluoride Research who repeatedly warned about the risks of toxicity when fluoride was used in the prevention of dental caries. Khandare recorded that Akiniwa was a dedicated research scientist in the field of Fluorosis and that his passion for improving public health will be remembered and cherished by all who knew him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noncommunicable diseases (NCD) have become the biggest issue of health care worldwide. Mainstream medicine is not able to overcome this problem due to its focus on symptoms instead of causes. On the other hand, there is an overwhelming flood of interdisciplinary research leading to a new understanding of the human being with huge implications for our health. We had to learn that our body is not a single being but a temporary aggregation of our environment, consisting of billions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi as well as a similar amount of human cells, forming a microcosm in the macrocosm of our universe and provided with unique abilities. This "human system" is nonlinear, self-regulating, self-regenerating, self-reproducing, and constantly connected to its environment via the exchange of information and material. The next thing we had to learn concerns our genes. The cells are using the genetic information like a textbook, which has been written by evolution. The use of this genetic information is largely dependent on environmental factors which influence the reading of the genes by a mechanism called "epigenetics" which is a kind of intelligent interface to our environment. While the structure of genes is kept stable over long periods, epigenetics are able to react quickly to changes in the environment of the being. We do not live just by chance in a terrestrial environment and these environmental factors are prerequisites of our human life which has been styled by them. As a result, changing the environment by technical progress has not only led to its pollution by a large variety of nonhistorical elements (NHE) but also to the loss of an equally large number of health resources: the long list of these lost natural resources from our environment starts with micronutrients and essential fatty acids in our processed food, goes on with physical factors like gravity and sunlight, and ends up with a variety of social factors in our communities. One example of a negative environmental influence is fluoride, the topic of this conference. While fluoride has been a long known local environmental problem in some areas of China and India, today it has become a worldwide problem as a by-product of the nuclear and fertiliser industries resulting in the poisoning of people all over the world. The same happens with aluminium and other metals. Another typical example of environmental influence on the human body is the interaction of the UVB radiation with our skin, producing the "solar hormone vitamin D". As all our cells have receptors for the solar hormone, vitamin D is essential for our health and involved in the origin and progress of almost all noncommunicable diseases from diabetes to dementia and cancer. Due to our change from living in a natural environment with extended sun exposure to living in an artificial environment (buildings, cars, et cetera) we have almost completely lost our exposure to the sun and by that the chance to produce the solar hormone and get, as a result, a worldwide disease favouring deficiency. Conclusion: to overcome NCD three actions needed: 1. teaching people the new knowledge to improve their health literacy; 2. providing the lost former natural factors from the environment by intelligent replacement measures and, at the same time, 3. reducing the pollution by nonhistorical elements. These combined procedures will enable our bodies to (re)use their inborn evolutionary skills not only to develop optimum health but also to treat the diseases of diabetes, depression, dementia, and multiple sclerosis. In consequence, noncommunicable diseases are no longer an unsolvable problem. We have the knowledge to overcome them and we should apply it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study was to develop a model for describing the relationship between the fluoride (F) content in drinking water and foodstuffs, and the urinary F level in residents, of different age groups, residing in low and high F exposure areas in Mitauli block, Lakhimpur (Kheri) district of Uttar Pradesh, India. The rural population at the study sites used groundwater for drinking and irrigation purposes without any quality test. The source of the F contamination in the groundwater was natural as no large industries were located in the study area which contained only a few agro-based industries. The F concentration was measured in the groundwater from 73 sites in Khanta, Khudania, Murai-tajpur, Salahpur, and Usari villages and in the urine of 548 residents. The range of the F concentration in the drinking water in Khanta, Khudania, Murai-tajpur, Salahpur, and Usari villages was 1.0-2.3, 0.5-1.4, 0.9-1.5, 1.8-2.8, and 2.7-4.3 mg L-1, respectively. The urinary F level in the 548 villagers was found to vary in different age groups. The highest urinary F concentration (4.73 mg L-1) was found in younger males, aged 20-40 yr, with the next highest group (3.72 mg L-1) being older females, aged 60-70 yr. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ground water forms the most common source of drinking water in the rural as well as the urban areas of Bihar, India. In some regions of the world, including India and in some rocky areas of Bihar, the earth crust is rich in fluoride-bearing minerals due to which the ground water is naturally fluoridated. Intake of fluoridated ground water for a long period causes fluorosis. Defluoridation of the available fluoride-rich water in fluorosis endemic areas for drinking and cooking purposes constitutes the main mitigation measure. Of the various defluoridation techniques available now, the one which is cheap, easy to operate, and which is associated with the least health hazard is the domestic defluoridator using burnt brick chips of specific composition as the filter material. The beneficiary families can operate, monitor, and change the filter material without any specialised training. This kind of domestic defluoridator based on burnt brick chips as adsorption material has been in use in fluorosis endemic regions of Sri Lanka for a long time. But the design of defluoridator developed in Sri Lanka and the type of filter material available there have their utility and suitability in Sri Lanka only. The climatic conditions available in Bihar, the level of fluoride concentration in groundwater here, the type of soil used for brick making in India, particularly in Bihar, etc. are quite different from those in Sri Lanka. Our team of researchers have designed and fabricated a model defluoridator using burnt brick pieces made of the red soil that is readily available in some areas of the Bihar and Jharkhand states. Fluoride-contaminated water samples collected from some fluorosis endemic areas of Bihar have been studied using the defluoridator designed and fabricated by our team. For this purpose fluoride-rich water samples were collected at the inlet and outlet points of the defluoridator and analysed for different physico-chemical parameters of drinking water including the fluoride concentration. The results obtained are encouraging, as the defluoridator fabricated by our team has been found to lower the fluoride concentration in fluoride rich water from 4-5 ppm to 1.0 ppm or even below, which is the safe limit for its use for drinking and cooking purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increased prevalence of malnutrition and gastrointestinal complications has been reported in fluorosis endemic areas. Fluoride induces injuries to soft tissue due to multiple changes in cellular metabolism and physiology including oxidative stress, protein damages, lipid peroxidation (LPO), and gut mucosal injury. Previously it has been reported that fluoride induced mucosal injury and retarded the absorption of ingested nutrients. In the present study, it was hypothesized that the chronic ingestion of fluoride may alter gut chemistry due to the fluoride ion having the highest electro negativity. This study was planned to examine the effects of fluoride ingestion on gut chemistry. After approval of the protocol by the Institutional Ethics Committee, AIIMS, New Delhi, India, fifteen-weeks-old Wistar rats (n=28) were randomly divided in to three groups. Group-1 was continuously administered 50 ppm of fluoride and Group-2 was administered 100 ppm of fluoride (equivalent to doses in humans of 10 and 20 ppm of fluoride, respectively) ad libitum, for two months. Group-3 was kept on normal drinking water and considered as a control group. Following two months of fluoride administration, the animals were sacrificed and their gut tissue and gut contents were harvested and subjected to various chemical and molecular evaluations. Histological and ultrastructural analyses were done. In the fluoride-exposed groups, a significant (p<0.05) change in the chemical nature of gut content was observed. Many histopathological and ultrastructural injuries in the colon were also seen due to the chronic fluoride toxicity. These changes lead to malnutrition in fluoride-exposed groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]