Feb. 24 (UPI) — Doctors at a New York hospital said a man who came in complaining of difficulty breathing through his right nostril was found to have a tooth growing in his nasal cavity.
Drs. Sagar Khanna and Michael Turner, surgeons with the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, said in a case study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that the 38-year-old man told doctors he had been having trouble breathing through his right nostril for several years.
Doctors discovered he had a deviated septum — a condition in which the partition between nasal passages is pushed to one side — and a rhinoscopy conducted with a small camera discovered the cause — a tooth growing on “the floor of the right nostril.”
The ectopic tooth, a term for a tooth growing in an abnormal place, was measured at about .6 inch long.
The surgeons said they removed the tooth without complications, and the man reported during a follow-up visit three months after the procedure that he was able to breath normally through both nostrils.