A 25-year-old Italian girl, treated for several years for polycystic ovary syndrome, went to the hospital after feeling hair grow in her teeth and gums.
Hair in the mouth, between the teeth and the gums. This is the unexpected, and probably unpleasant, discovery made by a 25-year-old Italian patient. In 2009, doctors carried out tests on the patient revealing high testosterone levels, as well as numerous cysts in the ovaries.
The examinations led to a diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome, a disease characterized by a hormonal imbalance that favors the increase in the production of androgen hormones. Doctors prescribed birth control pills to the patient.
The Italian had already been operated to remove hair located in the same area at the age of 19. But six years later, she showed up in the emergency room, with “an even greater presence of oral hair as well as on the chin and neck areas”, doctors report in the newspaper. Oral Surgery, Oral Medicine, Oral Pathology and Oral Radiology.
“Gingival hirsutism”
This abnormal hair growth corresponds to a disease first identified in 1960 and named aftergingival hirsutism. So far, she had only been diagnosed in five other patients, but they only had one or two hairs on their teeth, unlike the case of the Italian, the article says.
One of the hypotheses put forward to explain this phenomenon would be that the mucous tissues inside the mouth are closely related to those of the skin and could find themselves in contact with the cells which play a role in the production of hair. The exact cause of this follicular abnormality in this part of the body, however, is still unknown, the report concludes.
In the case of the young Italian woman, the doctors who wrote the study assume that this intraoral transformation could be linked to the fact that the patient has stopped taking her contraceptives.
