Doctors voice alarm: 5-fold jump in kids swallowing magnets

PARIS: Doctors from major hospitals in England sounded an alarm yesterday over a fivefold increase in the number of young children requiring medical treatment after swallowing magnets from toys. Nearly half of these kids aged four months and up required surgery to remove the magnets, often followed by complications, they reported in a research letter published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a medical journal. From 2016 through 2020, four major hospitals in southeastern England admitted 251 children who had swallowed a foreign object.

Coins accounted for 37 percent of the items ingested, ahead of magnets (21 percent) and button batteries (17 percent). Across all categories, the number of cases increased by more than half over this period. But those involving magnets-mostly brightly colored, matchstick-like pieces found in building sets-jumped fivefold, they reported.

More than 40 percent of these incidents required surgery for removal. “This was either laparoscopy-also known as ‘key-hole’ surgery-or open abdominal surgery to retrieve the magnets from the intestine,” Hemanshoo Thakkar, a pediatric surgeon at Evelina London Children’s Hospital, told AFP.

In half of the cases, there were complications. “As the children suffer from a perforation, their abdomen becomes contaminated and this can result in ongoing infections,” Thakkar explained.

“Some children have lost some of their bowel, which has to be removed if unhealthy.” The most serious case involved a youngster who underwent several operations, stayed in intensive care for a month, and in hospital for nearly five months.

No deaths were reported. “But left untreated, the injuries caused can be life-threatening,” Thakkar said. In Britain, regulations require that all magnetic toys be accompanied by a warning notice, but most manufacturers do not display them prominently enough, the authors wrote. In a case reported earlier this year in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, a three-year old boy in the United States swallowed six magnetized pieces one after the other. Two of them stuck together in his throat, and the rest settled in his abdomen.