'Excessive tea consumption causes unusual bone disease'

A 47-year-old US woman who drank 100 tea bag's worth of tea a day has lost all her teeth and has been diagnosed with a rare bone disease, also found in India, researchers claim.
The Detroit woman developed skeletal fluorosis - a bone disease caused by consuming too much fluoride - after drinking a pitcher of tea made from 100 tea bags every day for 17 years.
Skeletal fluorosis is endemic in regions of the world with naturally high levels of fluoride in drinking water, including some parts of India and China, but is rare in Europe and North America, 'MyHealthNewsDaily' reported.

The woman visited the doctor after experiencing pain in her lower back, arms, legs and hips for five years.
X-rays revealed areas of very dense bone on the spinal vertebrae and calcifications of ligaments in her arm, said study researcher Dr Sudhaker D Rao, a physician at Henry Ford Hospital.
Researchers said the patient's blood levels of fluoride were four times higher than what would be considered normal.

Low levels of fluoride are added to drinking water to prevent cavities, but aren't high enough to cause fluorosis.
Rao said the patient was originally referred to him because her doctors suspected she had cancer, which can also show up on an X-ray as areas of dense bone.

Because Rao had seen cases of skeletal fluorosis in his native country India, he "was able to recognise it immediately."
Excess fluoride is typically eliminated from the body by the kidneys, Rao said. However, if one consumes a lot of it, as this patient did through tea drinking, over time, the fluoride forms crystal deposits on bone, he said.
A few other cases of skeletal fluorosis caused by tea drinking have been reported in the US. In these cases, patients typically drank a gallon of tea a day, Rao said.