You might have heard this story on the news already. It’s pretty shocking, so we wouldn’t be surprised! In India, there has been a very unusual and shocking dental condition landed a young boy in the hospital.
The teenage boy, Ashik Gavai lived in a small village in Amravati. He first realized there was an issue a year and a half before the operation. Finally when the pain in his mouth became severe, his father took him to JJ Hospital in Mumbai, in fear something serious was wrong with his son.
The doctors were not expecting to find what they did. Dr. Sunanda Dhiware reported to the BBC that Gavai came into the hospital with a swollen right jaw. Dr. Dhiware and his team soon realized Gavai had a seriously rare condition diagnosed as “a complex composite odontoma where a single gum forms lots of teeth. It’s a sort of benign tumor.”
Gavai underwent a 7-hour operation during which surgeons removed over 230 teeth from his mouth. In this rare condition, a single gum forms lots of teeth, forming a mass similar to a benign tumor. Dr. Dhiware reported they weren’t able to cut out the teeth initially because they had all grown together in large masses.
To address this issue, the team ended up using a chisel and hammer to remove the teeth, which were described as resembling “small white pearls.” At this time, Gavai has 28 teeth remaining. After much deserved recovery time, caps will be placed in his gums to replace the teeth that have been removed.
Gavai’s team described his condition are very rare. Dr. Dhiware said she had never seen anything like it in the 30 years of her career, but that made the case more exiting for her.
The few past cases of complex composite odontoma involved a mass of teeth that formed together in the upper jaw, and not nearly as many as in the case of Gavai. Also, Gavai’s tooth masses were deep in his lower jaw.
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