Besides professional fighters, babies and maybe your local drunk, everyone has teeth. Despite the fact that we use them on a regular basis we don't really give our teeth much thought past the formality of brushing and flossing. Our teeth are efficient tools (and apparently great accessory items!) that have always been recognised as an important part of the body. Believe it or not but dentistry has dated back as far as the Egyptians and Mayans, thankfully tools and methods have come a long way! Brace yourself for our top 10 weird facts about teeth!
1. Teeth Tattoos
Yes, you read it correctly! It is a growing craze for people to get images printed onto their caps and crowns. Patients wishing to get these tattoos have their caps and crowns sent to laboratories where the images are printed onto the tooth and fired at 212 degrees. It is common for people to get iconic logos and symbols, one amusing example even had the phrase "Bite Me" printed. At the moment it is not possible to get tattoos on healthy teeth.
Scientists at Princeton University have created a tooth tattoo that is not just personal artwork, but can actually can monitor bacteria in the mouth. The tattoo is a thin removable layer, made using a mixture of gold, silk and graphene- an ultra thin sheet of carbon, that adheres to the tooth enamel.
The graphene's unique properties allowed the scientist to form a small, flexible device that is able to detect bacteria at a much higher sensitivity than traditional methods. By combining the graphene with a small antenna, the detection can be picked up by a remote reader device that is small enough to be held in a user's hand. Powered by electrodes and an inductive coil, the tattoo uses antimicrobial peptides to latch onto germs. In tests, the researchers detected samples of bacteria that can cause surgical infections and others that can lead to stomach ulcers. The tattoo has a long way to come before becoming a mainstream as it must be developed to withstand the brushing of teeth.
2. Toothpaste alternatives
Commercial toothpaste has only been around for the past 200 years or so, before this people would use a range of different concoctions to try and keep their gnashers clean. As early as 5000 BC people were also taking care of their teeth and trying to remove bad breath. Ancient remedies for toothpaste included powder of ox hooves and burnt egg shells, that would be combined with pumice. The Greeks and Romans were known to use Charcoal and chalk to clean their teeth, a technique still used today by survivalists. To this day people still use alternatives to toothpaste as they believe the ingredients used are harmful for their teeth, brushing their teeth with remedies including things such as salt water and baking soda instead. I think I'll stick to my minty toothpaste!
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3. Bejeweled Teeth
The Mayans loved to show their power through aesthetics, with items such as stretchers that are now a mainstream fashion, and the advanced race had an extremely advanced understanding of teeth. People nowadays aspire for clean white teeth, and may get a gold or silver tooth fitted. The Mayans were known to drill holes in their teeth and fit gems in them, a very tricky procedure to complete without breaking the tooth, especially using such primitive tools. But the Mayans were not only known dentists for their bejewelling of teeth, they were also notorious for shaping them into more interesting shapes, often cutting parts of the tooth out. Although fashionable back then, we now know that our teeth are shaped particular ways to break different foods down, but I'm sure they looked dazzling!
4. Toothache Remedies
Everybody at some point has experienced a toothache, and let’s be honest, nobody enjoys them. and some people will go to great lengths to stop this unbearable pain. A tooth ache is commonly caused by tooth erosion, gum infection or a fracture of the tooth. Although we haven't always known this, in the past there has been some astonishing methods of practice to remove the pain.
There have been several odd methods known to remove a toothache, including a complicated procedure using seeds and wax, used to try and remove what was believed to be tiny worms in your teeth. Another method, a very mystical one at that, included speaking magic words and exchanging bodily fluids with a frog (through saliva). Not quite the princess and the frog, I can’t quite see it making it to Disney anyway!
Even nowadays there are extreme measures taken to relieve toothache. Ian Wilson, a dental charity worker for Bridge2Aid, found an awful case in Tanzania. A man suffering with toothache visited a local witch doctor, who in attempt to remove the teeth, resulted in breaking the man’s jaw in two places! Not only had the man had his jaw broken in two places, but was actually left that way for two and a half years, on top of the already months/years he had already endured the toothache for!
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5. Intermission - Fun Facts!
The worst is yet to come, so we thought we'd give you a little breather. Here's some fun facts you may have not known about those pearly whites of yours!
- An average person spends 38 days brushing their teeth over their lifetime.
- No two people have the same set of teeth—your teeth are as unique as your fingerprint, so be proud of your unique set of teeth!
- After the common cold, tooth decay is the world’s second-most common disease.
- Teeth begin to grow before you are even born. They start to grow whilst in the womb and most usually break through the gum between 6-12 months.
- The mouth produces on average 21024 litres of saliva, enough to fill a small swimming pool.
6. Growing Synthetic Teeth
Doctors in China have had a breakthrough in growing synthetic teeth using stem cells, but not in the most appealing way. Extracting stem cells is an incredibly difficult procedure but the Chinese doctors managed to do so using a urine sample! The doctors manipulated the stem cells, coaxing them into becoming a different cell type that would form a tooth. As it is illegal to perform these experiments on humans they tried to transplant the cell into the jaw of a mouse, mixing the cells with the mouse's. The stem call managed to bring a 30% success rate showing some dental pulp and beginnings of tooth enamel but the experiments are far from success. Stem cells must be sourced from a more reliable source before being transplanted into humans, as the urine stem cells would be extremely prone to infection.
7. Tooth in the wrong place!
Teeth are made for chewing your food, and we all know food goes in your mouth, but there have been instances of teeth turning up where they don't belong. One man had been experiencing several nose bleeds over the course of 3 years, until he became sick of it and decided to go to the doctors. What they found was astonishing, there was a tooth growing in the man’s left nostril! It had erupted through the floor of his nasal cavity and was roughly one centimeter long. Surgeons were able to remove the tooth without any problems, but why was it there in the first place? Well, about 0.15% to 3.9% of people in the world actually have spare teeth, formally known as mesiodentes. These teeth are known to turn around and grow the wrong way, occasionally making an appearance in the nose!
Teeth growing in your nose is not the most appealing of thoughts, but at least it makes sense. One particularly disturbing case involving Doug Pritchard, a 13 year old boy, who was experiencing agonising pain in his foot, went to the doctors after 2 days of the pain. The doctor discovered a tooth growing in the boy's foot! That must've been one pretty confused cell, sounds like something out of a horror movie!
9. Tooth-Eye Surgery
Now we've all heard stories of some pretty crazy surgeries that have taken place, but for me this was one of the craziest! Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis, also known as OOKP, is the medical procedure by which a tooth is removed or donated and implanted into the eye to restore vision for extreme cases of corneal and ocular surface patients. The method was pioneered by Italian ophthalmic surgeon Professor Benedetto Strampelli in the early 1960's.
The Procedure is a very technical operation and has 2 stages before sight can be restored. In very basic terms, the eye opened up and the entire inner surface of the eyelids, corneal surface and all scar tissue is removed. It is then replaced with tissue transplanted from the cheek. Next the tooth is removed, the tooth must be a canine or premolar so it can be shaped into a bolt shape structure and be drilled through the middle to fit a lens inside. Once this has been done, the doctor will then implant the tooth into the cheek, to allow it to grow a new blood supply. After a few months of the eye being lodged in the patients cheek it is then extracted and implanted into the eye, after removing the contents of the eye first of course.
The surgery is an odd one, and I’d really like to know what was going through Strampelli's mind when he developed the concept. Sounds like something out of Frankenstein's monster! The operation is used in very extreme circumstances and has high risks, as with any operation of this degree. These include extrusion, infection, glaucoma, retinal detachment, globe perforation, vitreous hemorrhage and retroprosthestic membrane formation. The cost for procedure is about £8,000-£10,000.
10. Too Many Teeth!
Through the lifespan of the average human we grow 52 teeth. From birth we start developing our primary 20 teeth, known as our baby teeth. At around the age of 6 these will begin to fall out to make room for the secondary set of teeth, our primary set of 28. Between the ages of 18 and 25 we grow our 4 Wisdom teeth, these are most usually removed or may never emerge. But not all of us will grow this many. As we discovered earlier some people have teeth growing in their nose and feet! Some people simply grow too many teeth in their mouth, this is known as hyperdontia and there are several different forms of the condition. One teenage boy, Ashik Gavai, suffered one type of the condition, known as complex odontoma. The boy's jaw was swelling on the right side, his parents feared it may have been cancer and took him to the doctors.
Local doctors were not able to diagnose the issue, so his parents took him to the city, what they found was truly extraordinary. Gavai had what looked like a benign tumour on his jaw, struggling to access it they ended up resorting to the classic hammer and chisel (Ouch!). The operation took a lengthy 7 hours and in total 232 teeth where extracted from the 17 year old boy! Dr Vandana Thorawade, who led the operation, along with two assistants and another surgeon had never seen anything like it. Medical literature states that the condition affects the upper jaw and a maximum of 32 teeth had been extracted in the past, making this an extremely rare case as Gavai's tumour was located on his lower jaw. Truly odd and extremely unsettling this is one of the weirdest cases in dental history!
