A non-invasive novel approach for managing digestive tract foreign body ingestion in children

Abstract

Objectives: The phenomenon of foreign body ingestion (FB) is considered a common scenario in children’s tertiary care clinical settings. This study aimed to assess the sociodemographic factors of ingested FB, and its details and find the efficient clinical outcomes of a novel non-invasive interventional approach for removing FB in children. Material and Methods: This was a prospective study of 55 patients in a tertiary care centre, Sri Lanka for 1 year from 2019. The univariate, bivariate analysis, and the Chi-squared test were used to check the relationship between two categorical variables as this study dataset comprises more than 50 observations, where 5% was used as the significance level. Results: This study’s mean age was 5.18 ± 3.1 years and the median 5 years. The higher number of ingested FB was metal (88.5%) among this coin (33.3%) recorded the highest contribution and round shape was 62% whereas the ratio between sharp edge and none sharp edge was 1:4. A greater number of children both males (58.3%) and females (30.6%) were managed spontaneously to pass the FB through stool while vomiting (2.78%) was observed only in males. In comparison, the endoscopy removal cases were female (5.56%) and their mean age was 7.7 years. Conclusion: There are a number of studies that claim that the management of FB ingestion relatively depends on children’s age, developmental stage, the type of the ingested object, and clinical presentation. However, our study contends that the majority of FB ingestion can be moved spontaneously through stool by applying the noninvasive therapeutic approach without causing clinical complications.