- A boy, 5, was taken to hospital after swallowing an entire pack of chewing gum.
- A CT scan showed the gum had formed what's known as a bezoar and was taking up 25% of his stomach.
A young boy was hospitalized after swallowing 40 pieces of chewing gum.
The 5-year-old from Ohio, who wasn't named, had an emergency procedure to have the gum removed after it formed a ball in his stomach, giving him diarrhea and stomach pain, according to a case study published in the medical journal JEM Reports.
Despite what urban legend would have you believe, gum does not sit in the stomach for seven years and, for the most part, swallowing a piece of gum accidentally isn't dangerous.
The body cannot digest gum, so it will pass through the digestive system and be excreted out, still relatively intact, according to Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist Dr. Elizabeth Rajan.
But it can become dangerous on rare occasions when large amounts of gum are swallowed because this can cause blockages.
This was the case for the Ohio child.
The boy ate 40 pieces of gum
The child was reported to have taken a piece of gum, chewed and swallowed it, and then did the same for the following 39 pieces in the pack.
On discovering what had happened, the boy's mom called poison control, who told her to take him to the ER if he developed abdominal pain.
The day after swallowing the gum, the boy experienced diarrhea and stomach pain and was taken to hospital.
A CT scan showed that the gum had lumped together in his stomach to form a bezoar — a collection of indigestible material found in the gastrointestinal tract, which is too big for the body to process.
Often bezoars do not need to be surgically removed and will pass naturally. But in the case of the Ohio boy, the bezoar was taking up 25% of the boy's stomach and so surgeons removed it by scooping the gum out from his stomach via his throat.
The report said that if bezoars aren't discovered or treated quickly, they can cause perforations — a hole in the wall of an organ — or ischemia — where blood flow, and therefore oxygen, are reduced to parts of the body — which could cause further and unnecessary complications and operations for the patient.
But in the case of the Ohio boy, he left the hospital the day after his operation with only a sore throat and some painkillers to show for it.