The key facts
- A dental prosthesis with five gold teeth had been in the man's right bronchus for about two years
- The patient was admitted to hospital with suspected pneumonia; examination revealed a foreign body
- The prosthesis was removed during emergency bronchoscopy; the bronchial tissues were undamaged
Unexpected finding amid suspected pneumonia
In Sterlitamak, doctors removed a dental prosthesis from a man's airways that had been in his bronchus for about two years. This was reported by Bashkortostan's Health Minister Airat Rakhmatullin. All this time, the patient was unaware of the cause of his ailment and explained his prolonged cough by age and a cold. In early October, his condition deteriorated sharply, and he was hospitalized with suspected pneumonia; however, the examination showed that a foreign object was located in the right main bronchus.
The prosthesis 'fell out in his sleep'
During a conversation with the medical staff, the patient recalled that about two years earlier he had woken up and discovered his dental prosthesis was missing. He decided that the appliance had simply fallen out in his sleep and did not look for the reason for its disappearance. In fact, the prosthesis with five gold teeth had entered the airways and lodged in the intermediate bronchus on the right.
Emergency bronchoscopy
The man was referred to the endoscopy department of City Clinical Hospital No. 1 in Sterlitamak. Specialists performed an emergency bronchoscopy, grasped the prosthesis with a special loop and carefully removed it, keeping the bronchial tissues undamaged. 'The airways are cleared, the cause of the chronic cough has been eliminated. The patient now faces recovery, but most importantly, there is no threat to his health,' the outlet quoted Rakhmatullin as saying.
Similar cases in other cities
Life.ru also recalls a similar case in Vladivostok, where a 43-year-old man lived for five years with a dental prosthesis in his airways. During that time, he developed severe inflammation with an abscess of the right lung; the foreign body had become overgrown with tissue, but doctors managed to remove it. In another case, doctors in Serpukhov accidentally discovered a fragment of a dental filling in a Russian woman that had been in her maxillary sinus for years — during preparation for implantation, an examination revealed an accumulation of fungal masses around it.
