A doctor in India was shocked and stunned to discover seven fully grown teeth in a newborn baby's mouth. He believes it may be the first such case in the world's history.
Prayan Sharma was born on 30th June in Ahmedabad, Gujrat, with seven fully grown teeth in his lower gums. But his first-time parents, mother Nikita Sharma, 31, and father Harish Sharma, 31, didn’t notice until he was ten-days-old.
Harish, the father, said: "As soon as my son was born he was moved to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) because he had an infection so my wife wasn’t able to breastfeed him at first. When he was eventually re-united with my wife and she tried to breastfeed him, she noticed something in his mouth. We were completely surprised. We never knew a baby could be born with one tooth never mind seven teeth."
Harish eventually consulted a pediatric dentist when Nikita continued to struggle to breastfeed and noticed also that his teeth had become loose. Upon examining the infant, the paediatrician found white tissue in his mouth and referred the family to Dr Ramatri. Dr Ramatri confirmed that the baby had seven teeth in his mouth, all of which were completely grown.
"Sometimes you see tips (of the teeth) in newborns but they don't grow for a while. In this case, the teeth were fully out." Dr Ramatri said.
Doctors in the western Indian state of Gujarat then successfully extracted seven teeth from a one-month old infant. "The baby is doing fine now," dental surgeon Dr Meet Ramatri said. He said that the procedure was carried out in two stages. They first extracted four teeth, and then the other three.
While Dr Ramatri said he had not read about a case like this before, he felt that it was not necessarily abnormal.
"It is a normal biological process. It happened early in this case," he said. He was forced to remove the teeth surgically, he added, because they were not firm, and if one of them had broken off, it could have got stuck in the baby's windpipe, which would have been fatal. "I was praying that the teeth wouldn't come off before we operated."
The baby is able to feed now he said, but added that it was hard to say if the surgery would interfere with how the baby's teeth would grow in the future.