Rare ... Only five other cases in medical literature found teeth in the type of tumour removed from a baby's brain. Source: News Limited
DOCTORS at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US have removed a rare tumour that contained several fully grown teeth from a baby boy's brain.
The tumour was found in the four-month-old from West Virginia in 2012 after a pediatrician noticed that his head was unusually large for his age.
Doctors wrote about the findings in an article that appeared this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The discovery could someday help researchers trying to cure diseases or grow new organs, medical experts said.
"It gives us more insight into the origins of the tumour," said Dr Edward Ahn, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins who was the lead surgeon in the case.
The tumour found in the child was a craniopharyngioma, a rare mass found mostly in young children that can press up against the pituitary gland and optic nerve and cause pressure in the brain, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Only five other cases in medical literature found teeth in these types of tumours, Dr Ahn said.
Teeth are more commonly found in another kind of tumour, teratomas.
Doctors have found many bodily structures, including fingers and even partially formed humans, in teratomas because their cells have the ability to form any kind of cell type or organ system within the tumour mass, said Dr James T. Rutka, a pediatric neurosurgeon and chair of the University of Toronto's department of surgery who was not involved in the Maryland case.
"If they are absolutely certain this is a craniopharyngioma, it would be way less common" to have teeth or any body part, said Rutka, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neurosurgery and a past president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.
The baby's mother, who did not want to be identified to protect her family's privacy, said in an interview that she took her son to the pediatrician for a stuffy nose in 2012.
Doctors discovered that the boy's head had grown significantly from two weeks before when it was measured during a routine visit.
An ultrasound and CT scan revealed the large tumour, which doctors said they had to remove through surgery.
"The tumour was very large and the baby was so small," Dr Ahn said.
"To do this type of surgery on a four-month-old baby is extremely risky, but something we had to do right away."
Until the surgery, doctors didn't know what kind of tumour had grown on the child's brain.
Once inside the brain, Dr Ahn discovered a solid tumour with pieces of white that he thought at first was calcium, which is not unusual in these tumours.
Craniopharyngioma tumours are formed from the lining of the brain or back of the mouth and often have calcium inside but not organised into teeth, Rutka said.
"We had to think twice," Ahn said.
"We first thought they were flakes of calcium. When we looked at it closer, we were like, 'Those really look like teeth', "
A pathologist confirmed a week later that they were teeth.
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