India doctors remove seven teeth from infant
- Published
The surgery was done in two parts
Doctors in the western Indian state of Gujarat have successfully extracted seven teeth from a one-month old infant.
"The baby is doing fine now," dental surgeon Dr Meet Ramatri, who carried out the operation in August told BBC Hindi's Sushila Singh.
He said that the procedure was carried out in two stages. They first extracted four teeth, and then the other three.
The baby's teeth were discovered a few days after his birth.
His parents took him to a paediatrician when he had difficulty breastfeeding.
Upon examining the infant, the paediatrician found white tissue in his mouth and referred the family to Dr Ramatri.
"When I examined him, I found that he had seven teeth," Dr Ramatri told BBC Hindi.
"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."
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.
Doctors said the baby is doing fine now
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.