Indian doctors say they removed 116 iron nails lodged in a patient’s stomach.
Bhola Shankar, a 43-year-old gardener living in northwest India (Rajasthan), presented to hospital on May 13 with stomach aches. The caregivers not finding any clinical sign that could be linked to a classic pathology, they decided to take an x-ray.
Stunned, they then discovered 116 iron nails lodged in the patient’s stomach, each 6.5 centimeters long. Luckily, none of the nails had perforated the abdominal wall. They were able to be extracted from Bhola Shankar thanks to emergency surgery, performed the day after his hospitalization.
Pica syndrome
When questioned, the gardener could not explain why he had so many nails in his stomach, nor could the doctors say how long the scrap had been there. While Bhola Shankar is now fully recovered physically, practitioners believe he may be suffering from Pica syndrome, a severe eating disorder.
Pica is characterized by the long-term ingestion (over a month) of non-nutritive and inedible substances: earth, chalk, sand, paper, plastic, white lead, vegetable hedge, nappies, cigarette ash, etc. Pica can be benign, or on the contrary life-threatening.
Acuphagia
The different types of pica are generally distinguished by the nature of the elements ingested. The most common form of pica, historically and geographically, and the most studied, is geophagia (soil ingestion). It is an almost universal phenomenon, reported in all eras, and which consists of ingesting mud, clay, chalk… or any other type of earth or mineral, for nutritional, cultural or psychological.
Gardener Bhola Shankar suffers from acuphagia, which refers to the ingestion of sharp and pointed objects. Very rare, this eating disorder is extremely dangerous for those who suffer from it, since it can destroy their intestines, and therefore die.
.
