BALTIMORE — 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.
Teeth are more commonly found in another kind of tumor, teratomas. Doctors have found many bodily structures, including fingers and even partially formed humans, in teratomas because their cells have the ability to form any kind of cell type or organ system within the tumor mass, said Dr. James T. Rutka, a pediatric neurosurgeon and chair of the University of Toronto’s department of surgery who was not involved in the Maryland case.
“If they are absolutely certain this is a craniopharyngioma, it would be way less common” to have teeth or any body part, said Rutka, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neurosurgery and a past president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.
The baby’s mother, who did not want to be identified to protect her family’s privacy, said in an interview that she took her son to the pediatrician for a stuffy nose in 2012. Doctors discovered that the boy’s head had grown significantly from two weeks before when it was measured during a routine visit.
An ultrasound and CT scan revealed the massive tumor, which doctors said they had to remove through surgery.
“The tumor was very large and the baby was so small,” Ahn said. “To do this type of surgery on a 4-month-old baby is extremely risky, but something we had to do right away.”
