Abstract
Foreign body ingestion is frequently the cause of emergency visits in the pediatric population, and these cases are challenging to diagnose and manage. In particular, the ingestion of magnets is dangerous and can lead to serious complications and even death. Urgent endoscopic intervention or surgical exploration remains the best approach for removing multiple ingested magnets and preventing further injury to the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. We report a nine-year-old child with an adjustment disorder who developed a gastrocolic fistula following the deliberate ingestion of multiple magnets. The magnets were successfully retrieved after an emergency laparotomy, and the fistula was subsequently repaired.
Highlights
In children, especially those aged six months to three years, foreign body ingestion is common and, in many cases, unintentional
Intake of multiple magnets can lead to the entrapment of bowel loops between them, resulting in perforation, obstruction, peritonitis, bowel ischemia, and necrosis, as well as fistula formation [3]
Most ingested objects are harmless when they are small and blunt, and they can be spontaneously evacuated from the GI tract
Summary
Especially those aged six months to three years, foreign body ingestion is common and, in many cases, unintentional. She had no history of fever, upper respiratory tract symptoms, shortness of breath, chest pain, cyanosis, previous admissions, surgeries, or allergies She did have a history of an adjustment disorder following her parents’ divorce three months earlier, but no history of developmental delay or intellectual disability. An abdominal x-ray taken at admission showed a foreign body of metallic beads, about 10 cm in length, in the left upper quadrant of her abdomen (Figure 1A) Their ingestion was not witnessed, and the parents could not identify the object as seen on x-ray images. On the fifth postoperative day, the patient was transferred to the child and adolescent psychiatric unit at our hospital for further psychiatric assessment and management of her adjustment disorder She remained asymptomatic at a two-week follow-up appointment in the pediatric surgery clinic
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