Teenage boy has tooth growing from eye socket in rare case that stunned doctors

A 16-year-old boy needed a tooth removing from the unusual location of his eye socket, a strange place for a tooth to be, after it started poking through his skin.

There had been a swelling on his eye socket for about a month but he hadn't been in any pain, then two points started to poke through his skin and a scan revealed they were part of a fully formed canine tooth growing there.

This is something known as an 'ectopic tooth', where one of your chompers begins growing in a place it shouldn't, and in this unfortunate instance it was the teenager's eye socket where the tooth grew and pushed through.

It's a very rare condition and most of the time they grow in the space behind your cheekbone, but various studies have found that they can develop in the nasal cavity, palate, chin, jaw joint and of course the eye socket.

Researchers presenting this finding said the teenager, from India, had 'no history of trauma' but was experiencing 'a painless swelling of the left upper eyelid for one month'.

The 16-year-old had a tooth growing in his eye socket (AAO Journal)

Doctors saw 'two hard, well-defined whitish projections' which further investigation turned up as a 'well-defined hyperdense structure with crown–root morphology'.

In other words, this was the tooth.

They didn't know why he'd developed an ectopic tooth in his eye socket but the surgery to get it out was successful and his eyes are now not in danger of being poked by the roots of a tooth that shouldn't be growing there.

While surgical removal is the solution for many ectopic teeth since they can cause infection, a cyst or block an important passage in the head, sometimes they are better left alone.

If the grown tooth is not in the way of anything and not doing any harm then Dr Saroash Shahid explained in The Conversation they might be best left alone.

An x-ray of the teenager's head found a canine tooth growing in his eye socket (AAO Journal)

Fortunately for the teenager his tooth didn't cause him pain or discomfort, and it was out pretty quickly.

That's not the case for everyone, as a 38-year-old man who had breathing problems for years had to wait a long time to learn the truth about it, he had an ectopic tooth growing in his nose.

Scans found the tooth in the floor of his right nostril and he needed to go in for surgery to get it taken out.

It turns out having the misplaced tooth taken out of his nose worked wonders for clearing up his breathing problems.

Canine teeth are the most common kind of ectopic teeth to develop somewhere else in the skull other than the mouth.