A Man Grew a Tooth in His Nose
A man’s years of trouble breathing through his nose turned out to have a much stranger explanation than anyone could have imagined. His doctors, in a paper out this week, describe finding a tooth poking through his nasal cavity. Thankfully, the wayward chomper was removed with no complications, and the man’s stuffy symptoms went away.
The study on the nose tooth was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. According to the report, a 38-year-old man had visited an ear, nose, throat clinic at Mount Sinai in New York with complaints of difficulty breathing through his right nostril—a problem that had been going on for several years at that point.
Physical examination revealed a deviated septum (the cartilage in the middle that separates one nostril from the other, which can get displaced for various reasons), along with some kind of bony obstruction and a two-centimeter-long tear towards the back of the septum. When they looked closer using a rhinoscope—basically a camera attached to a tube—they found a “hard, nontender, white mass” sticking out of the floor of the nostril. And when they ran a CT scan, they clearly identified what this mass was: a tooth growing where it shouldn’t have been. ...
In anatomical terms, the man had an ectopic tooth, ectopic being a catch-all term for the abnormal placement of a body part. Ectopic teeth can happen for several reasons. Sometimes, our permanent adult teeth can grow out, or erupt, in an unusual path. Other times, the process of replacing our baby teeth doesn’t go quite right and a baby tooth ends up being pushed out by its adult counterpart, but doesn’t fall out as expected and just stays in our mouth, albeit in a very awkward position. Or, an extra tooth could spontaneously appear even in adulthood. ...