Did you see the medical news about a tooth growing in a man’s nasal cavity? (Illustration: Getty)
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This is what happens when you find the tooth behind a man’s breathing problems. A case report recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine described how something up a 38-year-old man’s nose had made it more difficult for him to breathe through his right nostril for several years. And it wasn’t a rubber hose.
In the case report, two oral surgeons, Sagar Khanna, B.D.S., D.D.S. Michael Turner, D.D.S., M.D., from the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, NY, described this tooth fairy interesting discovery. The man had visited an otolaryngology clinic where his doctor found the septum of his nose to be deviated. The septum is the piece of cartilage separates your nose into two possible entry points for when you want to pick your nose. A deviated septum is when this cartilage is off-center, pushed somewhat to one side. A deviated septum alone can made it more difficult to breathe out of one nostril. But there was more.
This man’s septum also had some unusual bony protrusions as well as a 2-cm hole. This hole problem prompted the doctor to conduct a rhinoscopy exam. Now, a rhinoscopy isn’t what you do at a nightclub full of rhinos. Instead, in this case, “rhino” is the medical prefix for “nose.” And a scope is a medical device that allows you to look into particular parts of the body. Thus a rhinoscope is a thin tube equipped with a camera that you can insert into a nostril and use to view inside the nasal cavity. The rhinoscopy then revealed a “hard, nontender, white mass” in the man’s right nostril.
This, of course, is not what you should typically find in one’s nostril, assuming that you didn’t store a “hard, nontender, white mass” in your nose. A CT (computed tomography) subsequently confirmed that this mass was in fact an upside down tooth lodged in his nasal cavity. Of course, a tooth, whether upside down or right side up, doesn’t belong up your nose. After all, you don’t typically shove a burrito up your nose to chew on it.
Behold the tooth in the following tweet from the New England Journal of Medicine:
So, the oral surgeons deemed this to be an ectopic tooth. Dictionary.com defines “ectopic” as “occurring in an abnormal position or place.” Surgeons then removed this tooth, which ended up measuring 14 mm in length. The man had a smooth recovery from the surgery and three months later was no longer experiencing any issues breathing. Ultimately, the man didn’t want the tooth because his nose couldn’t handle the tooth.
Obviously, this was an unusual case. The next time you have some issues breathing through your nostril, your first thought shouldn’t be, “darn, I must have a tooth growing there.” Instead, consider much common causes first such as allergies, a cold, a sinus infection, a deviated nasal septum, oversized adenoids, nasal polyps, or a foreign object up your nose. So if you do have any problems breathing through your nose and at the same time can’t remember where your placed your loose change, there might possible be a single answer behind both issues.
