NEW YORK: A doctor removed a tooth from a man's nose, which had been troubling him to breathe for years.
A 38-year-old man had visited a clinic at Mount Sinai with complaints of difficulty breathing through his right nostril. The doctors found a tooth poking through his nasal cavity. They carefully removed it, leaving no complication, and after that, man's stuffy symptoms disappeared.
Later, this case report 'Ectopic Tooth in the Nose' published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The report stated that a 38-year-old man had visited an ear, nose, throat clinic at Mount Sinai in New York with a stuffed nose and difficulty breathing through his right nostril. These problems had been triggering him for several years. Physical examination showed a deviated septum (the cartilage in the middle that separates one nostril from the other), some bony obstruction and a two-centimetre-long tear towards the septum's back. After close examination with a rhinoscope (a camera attached to a tube), they noticed a hard, non-tender, white mass popping out of the floor of the nostril. Meanwhile, a CT scan identified that this mass was a tooth growing where it shouldn't have been and turned out to be an ectopic tooth.
Ectopic teeth happen when permanent adult teeth can grow out, or erupt, in an unusual path, or the replacement of baby teeth doesn't end up as expected. Sometimes, an extra tooth spontaneously appears even in adulthood. However, despite the cause, genetics has been considered a risk factor for the condition.