For three months, a 55-year-old woman had a dry cough she could not shake. Then she began coughing up large amounts of blood. Imaging showed a soft-tissue mass blocking the airway to the lower part of her left lung, and that section of lung had completely collapsed, a combination doctors often associate with lung cancer. The explanation her doctors eventually settled on was far more surprising: the concentrated peroxide gel used to whiten her teeth.
The case was published in January in Cureus by pulmonology and forensic medicine specialists at Laghouat Public Hospital in Algeria. The authors write that airway lesions caused by hydrogen peroxide exposure are exceedingly rare.
