The world’s longest human tooth extracted

A patient with an abscess of the canine fossa starting from the tooth 13 turned up at the dental office. Such an abscess requires immediate and consistent surgical intervention to avoid potential lethal complications for the patient. The highlying swelling reaching the infraorbital area was quite impressive in this case. The panoramic radiograph that was taken (Fig. 1) revealed a canine of considerable radiographic length. The upper canines of the human have the greatest mean length of all the teeth of the human dentition. A conservative tooth treatment can cause problems just as a surgical tooth preservation in the context of a root tip resection would. An alio loco trepanation and root canal preparation had previously been unsuccessful. The instrumen-tation of the tooth was impossible for the colleague due to its canal length. The difficult access to the root tip as well as the degree of destruction on the palatal side and the abscess spoke in this case against a resection and for the extraction of the tooth. After surgical removal and measurement of the tooth, it was confirmed that with 37.2 mm this was the longest tooth ever extracted by a human being.