Sunday, March 2, 2014

Strange

From the Baltimore Sun:
Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital have removed a rare tumor that contained several fully grown teeth from a baby boy's brain.
The tumor was found in the then-4-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 tumor," said Dr. Edward Ahn, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins who was the lead surgeon in the case.
The tumor 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 tumors, Ahn said.
Read more: http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bs-hs-tumor-teeth-20140228,0,2331579.story#ixzz2unPIUSJV
Hopefully, the little guy survives and then thrives.

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