Los Medanos College (LMC) is a public community college in Pittsburg, California. Established in 1974, LMC has an extension in Brentwood and is part of the Contra Costa Community College District..
OBJECTIVE:To investigate the effects of commonly prescribed antibiotics and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) during early life on enamel development through a systematic review with quantitative synthesis. METHODS:PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, CINAHL, and Scopus were searched for English-language studies published between 1995 and 2024. In vitro and in vivo experimental studies evaluating antibiotics and/or NSAIDs during tooth development were included. Quantitative meta-analysis was restricted to in vivo animal studies reporting comparable outcomes for enamel thickness or mineral content, while in vitro studies contributed to qualitative mechanistic synthesis. Studies focusing solely on dentine, using questionnaires, lacking extractable data, or classified as grey literature or reviews were excluded. RESULTS:Experimental exposure to antibiotics and NSAIDs was associated with alterations in ameloblast morphology and function, including changes in tight junction proteins, MMP-20, KLK4, COX-2, and Runx2 expression. Enamel matrix abnormalities such as vacuolar changes and cyst-like lesions were frequently reported. Quantitative synthesis indicated a moderate-to-large pooled effect estimate for reduced enamel thickness associated with amoxicillin exposure (Cohen's d = 0.79, 95% CI: 0.40-1.36), with a trend toward larger effect sizes at higher experimental doses; these estimates were interpreted cautiously due to substantial heterogeneity. NSAIDs were primarily associated with qualitative disturbances in enamel mineralization. Pooled effect estimates for calcium (Cohen's d = 0.52, 95% CI: -0.21 to 1.46) and phosphorus (Cohen's d = 0.46, 95% CI: -0.31 to 1.75) were inconsistent and imprecise. CONCLUSIONS:Certain antibiotics and NSAIDs may disrupt ameloblast integrity and enamel biomineralization in experimental animal models. These findings are hypothesis-generating, and further well-designed human observational and mechanistic studies are required before clinical translation. CLINICAL RELEVANCE:This systematic review synthesizes experimental evidence on the biological vulnerability of developing enamel to pharmacological exposure, highlighting potential mechanisms underlying enamel thinning and hypomineralization while underscoring the need for cautious interpretation when extrapolating animal data to human clinical contexts. PROSPERO Registration No.: CRD42025606606.
We prove that every proper edge-coloring of the n-dimensional hypercube Q_n contains a rainbow copy of every tree T on at most n edges. This result is best possible, as Q_n can be properly edge-colored using only n colors while avoiding rainbow cycles.
Circuits are fundamental objects in linear programming and oriented matroid theory, representing the elementary difference vectors of a polyhedron. A recent concept introduced by Dadush, Huiberts, Natura, and Végh, the circuit imbalance, serves as a complexity measure relevant to iteration bounds for circuit-based augmentation and circuit diameters, and the interpretability of circuits in terms of the underlying application. In this paper, we analyze linear programming formulations of relaxed combinatorial optimization problems to prove two contrasting types of results related to the circuit imbalance. First, we identify simple and polynomially-sized constraint structures, in particular arising in graph-theoretic problems, that lead to an exponential circuit imbalance. These constructions show that, in quite general situations, working with the entire set of circuits poses significant challenges for an application of circuit augmentation or the study of circuit diameters, even with a compact description of the underlying polytope. Second, through a case study of two classic graph-theoretic problems with exponential imbalance, the vertex graph coloring problem and the maximum weight forest problem, we exhibit the existence of sets of highly interpretable circuits within the set of 0/1 circuits of (best-case) imbalance 1. We prove that a restriction of circuit walks to these sets suffices to not only guarantee reachability of the integral extreme-points, but leads to a linear bound to walk between integral extreme-points for the fractional coloring polytope and a constant circuit diameter bound for the forest polytope, respectively. We conclude with a brief discussion of more general questions arising naturally from the use of 0/1 circuits in reachability and diameter studies.
