| MadSci Network: Immunology |
Dear LH: I have done some searching on tonsiloliths, and couldn't find any references that actually say why stones come out after infection. I did find a reference from 1983 in a journal called Oral Surgery which studied 17 cases of tonsil stones. Three of the patients came in to the doctor complaining of a recent history of infection, so there may well be something to what you are saying. I also learned that the stones themselves often contain lots of bacteria, but these bacteria seem to just be normal occupants of the human mouth, and so probably weren't the cause of any kind of infection. Lastly, I found that the largest tonsilolith ever measured was 14.5 cm, in 1936! Sorry I couldn't answer your question better. If you would like to do some free web searching of the medical literature, you could check out http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/medline.html. You can search the literature for any words in the title or abstract of journal articles, and then read the abstracts of the articles that match your search. If you have access to a medical or dental library, you could probably take a look at the articles themselves.
Try the links in the MadSci Library for more information on Immunology.