• Cheng-Jen Ma, Chang-Ming Jan, Jan-Sing Hsieh, Yu-Sheng Huang, Wen-Ming Wang, Hon-Man Chan, and Jaw-Yuan Wang.
• Department of Surgery, Kaohsiung Municipal Hsiao-Kang Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
• Kaohsiung J Med Sci. 2006 Sep 1;22(9):457-60.

AbstractForeign body ingestion is common, but ingestion of multiple sewing needles is rare. Most ingested sharp metallic bodies pass through the digestive tract spontaneously and patients can be managed conservatively. Sometimes, however, perforation develops and surgical treatment is necessary. It is hard to localize ingested sewing needles because they tend to scatter widely in the digestive tract and are impalpable manually. We report a psychiatric patient who ingested six sewing needles: one intact needle was found at the larynx, one had penetrated into the stomach, one was in the duodenum, one was in the cecum, one was broken into two pieces, and the final needle was broken into three pieces. All of the broken fragments were in the colon. The needle at the larynx was removed by a laryngoscope. Subsequently, we used mini C-arm fluoroscopy to localize the remaining needles and successfully removed all of them intraoperatively.

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