Baby’s rare brain tumor had teeth growing in it

If you're easily grossed out, you might want to skip this one.

Doctors recently published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, detailing how they removed several fully-formed teeth from the brain of a four-month old boy. This wasn't due to an injury or being bitten by some animal, though, it was due to a rare brain tumor called a craniopharyngioma.

This isn't the first time that teeth have been found growing in a brain tumor. Doctors have found many types of body tissues growing in a different kind of tumor, called a teratoma — hair, teeth, bones, and even things like eyes, limbs and full torsos. This is because these tumors develop from embryonic stem cells, so they can develop into many kinds of other cells. Craniopharyngiomas, on the other hand, are tumors of the pituitary gland, which produces hormones that play a role in our growth and sexual maturity, as well as blood pressure and metabolism, just to name a few.

This is apparently the first time that doctors have ever found anything like this in a craniopharyngioma. However, Dr. Narlin Beaty, the neurosurgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center who was on the surgical team that removed the tumor, told LiveScience that because they had found calcium deposits in these tumors before, doctors had their suspicions that craniopharyngiomas develop from the same cells in our bodies that go into growing teeth. However, up until now, there was nothing to definitely confirm those suspicions.

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As for the boy, the tumor unfortunately destroyed the connections between his pituitary gland and the rest of his brain, so he'll need hormone treatments for the rest of his life, to replace those his body can't produce on its own. However, Beaty told LiveScience that he was "doing extremely well, all things considered."

Craniopharyngiomas can grow quite large, but they tend to be benign, so they don't spread. Still, this baby boy was quite lucky.

"This was a big tumor right in the center of his brain," Beaty told LiveScience. "Before the modern surgical era this child would not have survived."

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