Overdose Leads to Skeletal Fluorosis

Too Much Tea: Overdose Leads to Skeletal Fluorosis, Rare Bone Disease
A Detroit woman’s 17-year-long extreme tea overdose caused her to lose all her teeth and experience debilitating bone pain.
BY ASHIK SIDDIQUE |
Tea overdose- you can definitely have too much of a good thing. After drinking an extremely concentrated pitcher of tea made from over 100 tea bags every day for 17 years, a 47-year-old Detroit woman developed a rare bone disease called skeletal fluorosis.
Tea contains trace amounts of fluoride, a mineral that is added to toothpastes and water supplies because small amounts help prevent tooth decay. Consuming too much fluoride, however, can lead to skeletal fluorosis, a bone condition that causes joint stiffness, bone pain, and brittle teeth.
The woman from Detroit went to see Dr. Sudhaker D. Rao, a bone and endocrinology specialist at the Henry Ford Hospital, after experiencing bone pain for five years in her lower back, arms, legs, and hips. In addition, all her teeth had been extracted because they became so brittle.
X-rays showed calcifications throughout the patient's arm ligaments and abnormally dense bones along her spine. The doctors who referred the patient to Rao initially suspected that she had cancer, but since Rao had seen skeletal fluorosis cases in his native India, "I was able to recognize it immediately," he told Livescience.....