Doctors Remove Brace Wire From Woman's Intestine By Gayathri Anuradha 08/08/17 AT 1:29 AM
When a 30-year-old woman visited the emergency room of Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Western Australia complaining of increasing abdominal pain, the best guess of the doctors there was it was a bad case of gall stones.
However, a CT scan showed something unexpected and worrisome — a foreign object lodged in the small intestine, and which had punctured its walls.
In the unusual case published Monday in the medical journal BMJ Case Reports, surgery revealed the woman had swallowed a seven-centimeter long dental wire, which had been lodged there for the last 10 years, possibly after breaking off from her orthodontic braces.
Strangely, the woman, who has not been named, had no recollection of swallowing it, according to a press release on the case.
The wire had pierced the intestine in multiple places, causing what was called a volvulus. According to the International Foundation for Gastrointestinal Disorders, it is a condition in which the intestine twists around itself.
Dr. Talia Shepherd, one of the treating physicians on the case, told CNN: "The chance of swallowing a wire from your braces is very low. There might be a higher chance if you're sedated and undergo a dental procedure. But this is a very unusual case.”
"I think it was probably just sitting there in her stomach the whole time, and then when the small bowel was punctured, that's when the pain started," she added.
The doctors in their report in the BMJ journal concluded from the case that “foreign body ingestion should be considered as a cause of abdominal pain in patients with no other medical or surgical history.”
Poster Comment:
Weird.