Piece Of Dental Braces Found In Woman's Stomach After 10 years

A 30 year old Australian woman complained of severe stomach pains, BMJ Case Reports wrote in a medical article on Monday. It was later found that she had a small piece of orthodontic wire removed from her intestines 10 years after she had her dental braces removed. The woman arrived a number of months ago at the emergency department at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Nedlands complaining of severe abdominal pain. Her heart was beating faster which than normal and her abdominal wall was inflamed.

Doctors initially thought the pain was related to her gall bladder and released her after the pain subsided, but she returned two days later complaining of extreme pain.

Dr. Talia Shepherd told ABC Radio Perth said "She was so unwell that we had to take her to theatre straight away to extract whatever it was, and it turned out to be a 7-centimeter piece of orthodontic wire from braces she had 10 years earlier."

The BMJ article read "The wire penetrated through the small bowel and the small bowel mesentery and to another loop of the mid-small bowel."

At first doctors suspected the woman might have swallowed a fish bone, but the woman had no recollection of swallowing one.

The item was actually a wire from the woman's dental braces, which she had removed 10 years earlier, Shepherd discovered.

Shepherd told CNN "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."

The wire had pierced the intestine in multiple spots and began to twist around on its own, obstructing the intestine and causing a condition known as volvulus.

"The chances of swallowing a wire from your braces are very low," she said. "There might be a higher chance if you're sedated and undergo a dental procedure. But this is a very unusual case.''

Shepherd said the situation was incredibly uncommon and people with braces shouldn't be concerned about a similar incident.

Shepherd also told Popular Science it's common for people to swallow objects, but it usually doesn't take more than a decade to be noticed.

She further added "The case is so unique because normally if you swallow something like that it presents (itself) earlier."

 

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