For immediate release: September 20, 2002.
For more information, contact Susan Griffith, 216-368-1004 or sbg4@po.cwru.edu

CLEVELAND—It doesn't scare Danny Sawyer when mummy skulls and teeth come out of the closet. What might raise goose bumps on most people fascinates the oral and maxillofacial pathologist.

Sawyer, chair of the Case Western Reserve University's School of Dentistry's oral diagnosis and radiology department, has explored the past as far back as 9,000 years by examining several hundred intact Peruvian and Chilean mummies and more than 5,000 skeletal parts of others. He searches for what diseases of the head and neck were prevalent and the general oral health conditions of the people from the past.

"Teeth are the most stable of all bodily materials," Sawyer said. "Even bones deteriorate more rapidly. The mandible and the skull in general, because of their mass and structure, often remain after other body parts are long gone. Thus, the head is left to explain things that occurred hundreds and even thousands of years ago."

Like the general public's fascination with mummies, Sawyer's research drew a crowd of dental scientists during a poster session at this year's annual meeting of the International Association for Dental Research in San Diego.

The mummies tell a story of how people lived. Few people reached old age, according to Sawyer. Most died from infectious diseases or malnutrition. Warfare also took its toll as was the fate of one young man Sawyer examined whose skull still had an arrow embedded in it.

Sawyer's primary research area is oral cancer. He is particularly interested in finding remains with head and neck cancers, of which few cases have been reported and confirmed in ancient populations. Sawyer has observed two cases of cancer of the head and neck region and four cases of benign neoplasms of the region.

Having been trained in dentistry as well as pathology, Sawyer also has a general interest in all oral disease, including those of the teeth. As part of one of his studies, he received governmental permission to bring some ancient teeth back to the United States for analysis, including a quantitative analysis of the level of trace minerals in them.

With the help of Arthur Heuer from the material science department at the Case School of Engineering, Sawyer and James Lalumandier, chair of the department of community dentistry, and dental students Rowan Ganon and Richard Shulze were able to detect levels of fluoride in a double blind study of the mummy teeth and correlate these levels with the incidence of dental caries in two population groups.

By using an ion beam accelerator, Heuer undertook a non-destructive analysis of the teeth's fluoride content. Using a technique called the nuclear reaction analysis (NRA), Heuer bounced protons off a spot the size of a millimeter to get a p, gamma portrait of the nuclear reaction that emitted gamma rays. The researchers determined the fluoride content of the teeth by analyzing the makeup of the emitted gamma rays. Presently the group is in the process of further analyzing the data and writing a manuscript for publication.

Sawyer's interest in disease goes back to his childhood where he plied his father, who was a mortician in Middleboure, W.V., with questions about why diseases kill people. As a high school and college student, he had the opportunity to observe a few autopsies, which only made him more curious about the disease process. While taking his first course in pathology, Sawyer said knew this was what he wanted to do with his life.

After earning his bachelor's degree in 1968 from Alderson-Broaddus College, he attended the Medical College of Virginia (M.C.V.) in Richmond where he earned his dental degree in 1973, his doctorate in general and experimental pathology in 1977 and completed his residency in oral and maxillofacial pathology.

While a dental student, Sawyer met Marvin Allison (a pathologist with a doctorate) and Enrique Gerszten (pathologist with a medical degree), both of whom had been involved in studies of disease in ancient populations in South America. Over the years, Sawyer joined them in examining skeletal and mummy materials in Peru and Chile. Altogether Sawyer has spent over a year in South America, mostly in three- to four-month segments, examining mummies and collecting data. Sawyer joined the research group in the mid-1970s, and this continuing research has produced over two dozen scientific articles.

Sawyer's academic career has taken him to four continents. As a medical/dental missionary, Sawyer with his wife Kathleen and five-month old son Robert (CWRU, 2001 B.S., B.A.) traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, where he taught and practiced pathology - at the College of Medicine and Lagos Teaching Hospital until 1983.

For much of the time, he was the only pathologist in the country and only one of a few hundred dentists serving a country of approximately 100 million people in an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma. While operating the hospital's oral and maxillofacial biopsy service, Sawyer had the opportunity to study diseases he may never encounter in the United States. He often saw patients in the medical clinic with leprosy, noma (cancrum oris) and Burkitt's lymphoma that are quite uncommon in the states.

From Nigeria, he headed to Glasgow, Scotland, where he joined the faculty of Glasgow Dental Hospital and School of the University of Glasgow. He participated in a program directed by Gordon MacDonald that studied the effect of iron deficiency on early oral carcinogenesis. This work rekindled an interest in carcinogenesis, which had been dormant since Sawyer's early training. He also had teaching responsibilities while in Scotland in a new program from training oral and maxillofacial pathologists from developing countries, and Sawyer helped with the training for a brief period of time and was even reunited with two students he had taught in Nigeria.

In 1984, Sawyer with his wife expecting their third child, returned to the United States. He became a faculty member at Loyola University of Chicago and later chaired the department of oral diagnosis, pathology and radiology in the School of Dentistry. He then came to CWRU in 1996 to chair the department of oral diagnosis and radiology.

He noted that early in his career in Nigeria, he had the "opportunity to teach not only in Lagos but also in two other universities giving those dental students all of their pathology lectures."

"During that time I came to know that I loved to teach and I certainly got plenty of practice having given over 200 lectures in general and oral and maxillofacial pathology combined at the three schools each year," he said.

Sawyer's research along with his experiences teaching on four different continents has been recognized by the CWRU dental school's Student Council. He has received their award for outstanding classroom teaching every year since his arrival at CWRU.

One of the more popular messages he imparts to his student: "You get an unusual view of life through teeth."

–CWRU–

 

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