In a ground breaking surgery, doctors in India have extracted 232 teeth from a young boy's mouth.
According to time.com website, "A boy in India endured a six-hour operation Monday to remove 232
teeth that grew as a result of a rare medical condition. Now, Ashik
Gavai, 17, has 28 teeth left—four fewer than most adult mouths.
The 17-year-old Gavai had been suffering from composite odontoma,
a condition in which a benign tumor forms in the mouth, causing
additional teeth to grow as well. In Gavai’s case, a molar tooth in his
lower jaw had grew hundreds of smaller teeth. Gavai’s doctors at J.J.
Hospital in Mumbai couldn’t initially remove the growth deep in Gawai’s
jaw with normal surgical tools, so they opted for a “basic chisel and
hammer” before more delicately removing teeth one-by-one. His doctors
called their operation a “world record,” and are planning to submit it
to Guinness World Records.
“I have never seen anything like it in all my years of practice,”
Sudanda Dhiware, head of the hospital’s dentistry department, told the
Washington Post. “We were so excited by it. And it was really fun for us to be able to extract them all, one by one.”
The condition doesn’t normally result in teeth as many as
Gavai’s — Dhiware said medical literature shows that a maximum of 37
teeth have been extracted in the past.
Gavai, who comes from a poor family of cotton growers hours outside
of Mumbai, had noticed swelling along his jaw months before his
operation. But local doctors were unable to fix his condition, and his
family didn’t have enough money to seek immediate, proper treatment.
Fearing that Gavai’s puffy cheek may have been cancer-related, his
family went to a state-run hospital, where they obtained funds through a
program offering financial support to poor patients.
Gavai is currently recovering from his grueling surgery, and his
doctors are hoping that the condition doesn’t reoccur—which it could, if
a bit of tumor, even microscopic, remains.
photo:bbc.com
photo:bbc.com
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