Dangers of magnetic toys

Paris – Doctors from major hospitals in England have sounded an alarm over a fivefold increase in the number of young children requiring medical treatment after swallowing magnets from toys.

Nearly half of these children, 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 foreign objects.

Coins accounted for 37% of the items ingested, ahead of magnets (21%) and button batteries (17%).

Across all categories, the number of cases increased by more than half over this period.

But those involving magnets – mostly brightly coloured, matchstick-like pieces found in building sets – jumped fivefold, they reported.

More than 40% of these incidents required surgery for removal.

“This was either laparoscopy – also known as keyhole surgery – or open abdominal surgery to retrieve the magnets from the intestine,” Hemanshoo Thakkar, a paediatric surgeon at Evelina London Children’s Hospital, said.