- The Guardian Saturday 3 August 2019
(^32) World
Rebecca Ratcliff e
Delhi
A seven-year-old boy who had suf-
fered occasional toothache was found
to have 526 teeth inside his jaw, sur-
geons in India said yesterday.
The hundreds of teeth were found
in a sac nestled in the molar region of
his lower jaw during surgery carried
out at the Saveetha dental college and
hospitals in Chennai.
“The teeth were of variable sizes
that ranged from smallest at 0.1mm to
largest, 3mm. They had a small crown,
enamel and a small root,” said Pratibha
Ramani, the head of the department
of oral and maxillofacial pathology at
the hospital.
“We had to drill down into the top
[of the lower jaw], make a window and
remove the sac ,” said Ramani. “As it
[the sac ] was going deeper into the tis-
sue the size of the teeth was becoming
very small.”
Despite the large number of teeth
in his mouth, the boy was not in much
Andrew Pulver
The Bollywood actor Sunny Leone
apologised yesterday after a man was
inundated with calls when his phone
number was used in her recent release,
Arjun Patiala.
Puneet Agarwal has received hun-
dreds of calls since the fi lm’s release
on 26 July. Leone’s character gives the
phone number to another character
in the fi lm.
Argawal was quoted as saying : “I
started receiving calls from unknown
people asking me to let them talk to
Sunny Leone. Initially, I thought some-
body is playing a prank on me, but after
a while, I got to know that the mak-
ers of the movie have actually used
my number.
“I am being harassed by many call-
ers, people are abusing me and asking
me to do dirty favours. I have fi led a
police complaint but till now the police
have not taken any action, even after
giving me assurances.”
The Times of India said Leone, who
has a small role in the fi lm, apologised
in an interview on ZoomTV.com.
pain, she said. “The only thing which
was bothering him was that the tooth
on that side had not erupted, it was
empty, and [he had] occasional pain,
and there was slight swelling that was
increasing in size.”
The boy suff ered from compound
composite odontoma, a benign
tumour. It is not known whether it was
caused by genetic or environmental
factors, she added.
The condition is very rare, although
doctors in Mumbai extracted 232 teeth
from the mouth of a 17-year-old boy
in 2014 over a seven-hour operation.
The surgery in Chennai lasted about
two hours, but it took experts 10 days
to analyse all the teeth. They are hop-
ing to study them further by carrying
out genetic tests.
“We had to take a lot of counselling
sessions with him for him to undergo
surgery. We have a very good coun-
selling team who have expertise in
dealing with kids,” said Ramani.
The boy, who now has 21 teeth,
was discharged after three days and
is doing well.
Dental surgery reveals
jaw-dropping 526 teeth
in mouth of Indian boy
Man whose number
was used in fi lm is
deluged with calls
▼ An X-ray of the jaw of the seven-
year-old boy in Chennai, India,
below. His smallest tooth was 01.mm
PHOTOGRAPH: SAVEETHA DENTAL COLLEGE
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