There are lots of ways to make history, and we all want to have our impact on life, but I suspect that for most of us, going down in the annals of history as a medical curiosity is near the bottom of the list of ways to do so.
I mean, everybody in the medical community at least will get to know your most intimate oddities, and sometimes they might even branch into the general public. No, thank you! But still, weird things happen that are worth learning about, like teeth growing in all the wrong places.
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Teeth seem to have a mind of their own when it comes to location scouting.
Take this 4-month old baby’s rare brain tumor — doctors established that he had a craniopharyngioma, a tumor that form from the cells involved in creating teeth. But they never expected to find an actual tooth in his brain.
There’s also been cases of cysts growing and developing teeth.
Miguel Belcon was suffering from heavy breathing, but ignored it due to his weight and historical issues with breathing. But when he finally sought medical attention, the doctors found a cycst with hair, teeth, and what appeared to be under developed eyes.
And now, there’s the case of the nasal tooth.
If you had a stuffy nose that wouldn’t clear up after blowing, and it lasted for two years, you’d think something was very wrong, right?
But would you ever suspect that the long-term blockage was caused by a tooth ?
That is not where teeth are supposed to grow. And yet, that’s how it happened for a 59-year-old man in Denmark.
Apparently the man had problems with a stuffy, drippy nose for a while, and then he started to lose his sense of smell as well.
It obviously ended up not being the typical seasonal head cold or allergies because it just didn’t go away.
He tried topical steroids to no effect, and so he went to the ear, nose, and throat doctors at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark.
They performed a CT scan that showed a “mass in the floor of the nasal cavity.
To a degree, he must have been happy to learn it wasn’t a cyst or a tumor. But still, a tooth?!
But still, a tooth?! That’s pretty astonishing.
Apparently it CAN happen sometimes, albeit extremely rarely.
As The Irish News reported, there have been all of 23 known cases like this man’s between 1959 and 2008.
Needless to say, the doctors immediately went to work removing the tooth with an endoscope.
It didn’t seem to be a particularly troublesome procedure. However, the doctors who treated the man are having much more difficultly explaining how the tooth ended up growing in his nostril in the first place.
“In our case there was no obvious explanation,” the doctors wrote in their case report.
They added that the man had suffered some facial trauma as a child, fracturing both his jaw and his nose, but that they didn’t believe that would have led to a tooth growing later in life.
So there’s a sigh of relief for anybody who’s been through that!
They said that it’s not unheard of for people with a cleft lip or cleft palate to have teeth grow in their noses, however.
And that trauma or infections from a cyst could cause such things as well, and they seem to occur more often in men by about 60%.
However, for this patient in particular, the cause remains elusive.
“Our patient most likely had the intranasal retained tooth most of his life, but had late onset symptoms,” the doctors said.
Thankfully, it looks like the extraction has been a complete success for the poor patient, with no new symptoms appearing a month later.
h/t The Irish News , Live Science
