A young man, whose age has not been revealed, required surgery after doctors found 21 magnets in his stomach and intestines. The case was reported by experts from the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine and the Guthrie Health System in the United States in a publication in the journal BMJ Case Reports.
The boy was taken to hospital with severe abdominal cramps. Xrays and computed tomography scans showed the presence of a metallic object in his digestive tract. However, the young man did not remember swallowing any objects and the family says it could just have been sleepwalking.
Doctors performed an endoscopy, a test in which a thin, flexible device equipped with lights and a camera at the end is inserted through the mouth to visualize the upper digestive system, which comes from the esophagus, the stomach and the initial part of the small intestine consists of intestine, duodenum.
First, they determined that the object appeared to be a stack of three stacked disks, each about 8 millimeters wide. The discs were super strong magnets and formed an ulcer (lesion) in the stomach wall. Experts say they were there long enough to cause serious problems.
Doctors managed to remove them using their own endoscopy. However, over the next two days, new tests showed that the case was much worse, with other similar objects throughout the digestive tract up to the colon.
Three of them were removed using colonoscopy, a procedure similar to endoscopy but inserted through the anus. The others had to be surgically removed. The case was serious and some objects were already forming holes in the walls of the organs.
After a few days of followup in the hospital after the operation, the boy was doing well. Meanwhile, doctors are investigating how the magnets got there. They say the young man and his family remained adamant, saying they believed it was ingestion during an episode of sleepwalking.
*With information from O Globo