Mumbai, Jul 24, 2014 : Doctors at the JJ Hospital in Byculla created a record of sorts by removing 232 teeth from a teenager, who came in with routine complaints of swelling and pain in the mouth. There are very few cases of this tooth developmental anomaly recorded in the dental literature, said doctors.
Ashik Gavai (17), a class X student from Buldhana, had a swelling on the right side of the mouth when he came to JJ Hospital on June. This was after several doctors failed to diagnose his condition. A battery of tests later, JJ doctors concluded that it was a rare abnormal growth affecting the second molar tooth on the lower right side of his jaw. The only solution was surgery.
But a bigger surprise awaited them during the surgery that lasted over seven hours on Monday. "We started picking small teeth from the abnormal molar. These pearlies were of varying sizes, some as tiny as a grain of mustard and some almost the size of a marble. At the final count, we had a total of 232 of them," said Dr Sunanda Dhivare-Palwankar, head of dental department at JJ Hospital. She said that they were developing as regular tooth and would have got more painful eventually. "The fact that it was coming from a single molar was very unique," she said.