Foreign Body Ingestions: A Twenty-Year Study That Is Not Easy to Swallow :

One would think with all the anticipatory guidance we give to families about safety-proofing the environment in which their children live and play, that accidents like ingestion of foreign bodies would be low. Unfortunately after reading a new study by Orsagh-Yentis et al. (10.1542/peds.2018-1988), you may think differently.  The authors share data compiled from 1995 to 2015 on 29,893 cases of foreign body ingestions in children less than 6 years of age, and from their case review extrapolated their data to project that an estimated 759,000 children under 6 were seen in emergency departments over the 20-year time period studied.  More worrisome is that the annual rate of ingestion almost doubled from 1995 to 2015 with most foreign body cases involving boys (52.9%) and children less than one (21.3%).  The top four categories involve coins (61.7%), various small toys (10.3%), jewelry (7.0%) and batteries (6.8%), with upticks in ingestion frequency for all four of these categories.  The penny remains the most popular coin (65.9%) ingested and button batteries lead in the battery category (85.9%) which is worrisome given how much damage these batteries can cause.  If we think we had foreign body ingestions under control, we need to think again. If you have discovered a strategy in your office to reduce the number of foreign body ingestions, please share that strategy with us by responding to this blog, posting a comment on the journal’s website with this article, or simply telling us what your secret is to no foreign body ingestion on our Facebook or Twitter pages.