Painful Cold Sensing in Teeth: A New Role for a TRP Channel in a Well-Known Tooth Cell
New research proposes that the odontoblast, via TRPC5, serves as a primary sensory cell responsible for tooth cold pain.
This article was originally published on the Pain Research Forum on 22 June 2021
by Neil Andrews
Which cells are responsible for painful cold sensing in teeth – the sensation that can accompany eating ice cream, drinking iced tea, or having an infected tooth? And which signaling molecules do they use to carry out this function? Despite decades of research, full answers to these questions have remained elusive. A new study now proposes that a member of a familiar family of ion channels, on one of the main cell types in teeth, underlies the phenomenon of tooth cold pain…