Doctors in India have managed to pull 232 teeth from the mouth of a 17-year-old boy in a seven-hour operation
Ashik Gavai had been suffering from swelling and pain in his mouth for 18 months, travelling around India trying to find a doctor who would look at his case. Local doctors in his village had been stumped about what had been going wrong, and Gavai had to travel to Mumbai to be seen by Dr Sunanda Dhiware, head of Mumbai's JJ Hospital's dental department, to get his odd problem fixed. The complex operation is understood to have set a world record, as doctors pulled out 232 teeth from Ashik's mouth. He has been diagnosed with a rare condition, identified by doctors as complex odontoma, which occurs when a single gum forms lots of teeth. Dr Dhiware explained "It's a sort of benign tumour. At first, we couldn't cut it out so we had to use the basic chisel and hammer 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"
Illustrating that Doctors get excited over the weirdest things, Dhiware went on to describe Ashik's case as "very rare" and said she "had not seen anything like this before in my 30-year career but [I'm] thrilled to get such an exciting case". In similar tumours up to 37 teeth have been found before, so Ashik certainyl seems to have set the record for number of teeth pulled out at once. Ashik has been left with slightly fewer teeth than the normal population, at 28, but he and his family are overjoyed he can live a normal life again. His father was worried he might have cancer, so finding out he just had a seriously large amount of teeth must have been great news. It's the little things...
