A study of ED patients who swallowed a foreign object concluded they should have an endoscopy to remove the object if they have at last one of three identified risk factors for complications, according to the study in the Journal of Emergency Medicine.
The complication rate for patients in the study was 9.7 percent. Risk factors for complications after foreign body ingestion were waiting longer than 24 hours for medical care, a positive radiographic finding and an age of more than 50 years. The authors strongly recommended that patients who present with at least one of these risk factors should undergo endoscopy to remove the foreign body.
The study found that fish bones were the most common foreign bodies caught in the esophagus, accounting for three-quarters of cases, and the most commonly affected site in the esophagus was the oropharynx, accounting for 64.5 percent of cases.
Read the Journal of Emergency Medicine study on endoscopy.
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