Doctors in India have
extracted 232 teeth from the mouth of a 17-year-old boy in a seven-hour
operation.
Ashik Gavai was brought in with a swelling in his right jaw, Dr Sunanda Dhiware, head of Mumbai's JJ Hospital's dental department, told the BBC. The teenager had been suffering for 18 months and travelled to the city from his village after local doctors failed to identify the cause of the problem.
It's a sort of benign tumour. At first, we couldn't cut it out so we had to use the basic chisel andhammer to take it out. Once we opened it, little pearl-like teeth started coming
out, one-by-one. Initially, we were collecting them, they were really like small white pearls. But then we started to get tired. We counted 232 teeth."
The
surgery, conducted on Monday, involved two surgeons and two assistants. Ashik
now has 28 teeth. Describing Ashik's case as "very rare", Dr Dhiware
said she had "not seen anything like this before in my 30-year
career", but said she was "thrilled to get such an exciting
case".
"According to
medical literature available on the condition, it is known to affect the upper
jaw and a maximum of 37 teeth have been extracted from the tumour in the past.
But in Ashik's case, the tumour was found deep in the lower jaw and it had
hundreds of teeth."
Ashik's father Suresh Gavai was quoted by the Mumbai Mirror as saying that his son complained of severe pain a month ago.
"I was worried that
it may turn out to be cancer so I brought him to Mumbai," he said.
How many teeth do you have?
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