An 11-year-old girl arrived at a clinic in Minas Gerais, Brazil, with something seemingly simple: removing some baby tooth fragments. No one imagined what the CT scan would reveal. 😶
The images revealed 81 dental pieces in total: 18 deciduous, 32 permanent, and 31 supernumerary, distributed throughout the jaw. Specialists at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora described it as an unprecedented “medical and dental puzzle”. To understand the scale: an average adult has only 32 teeth. This girl had almost three times that number. 🦷
The diagnosis was extreme multiple hyperdontia, an extremely rare developmental anomaly linked to a specific genetic alteration on chromosome 9.
The case was published in the American Journal of Orthodontics and went viral globally in 2023. A team of surgeons, orthodontists, and periodontists worked for months to resolve it — and they succeeded. 💪
