Digestive danger: Candy-color magnets ripping open kids’ bowels, UC Davis doctors warn
Increasingly, children are being sent to emergency rooms after swallowing multiple, tiny rare-earth magnets that then exert formidable force to bend, stretch and even tear intestinal walls in an effort to connect, UC Davis Health pediatricians warn.
Dr. Sunpreet Kaur, a pediatric gastroenterologist at UC Davis Health, said that, on average, the Sacramento-based teaching hospital is getting about one case a month. She recalled treating both a 5-year-old and a 12-year-old who accidentally ingested rare-earth magnets they were playing with in their mouths.
The 5-year-old girl “was playing with this tiny little balled magnets, making bracelets, making necklaces, and then she thought, ‘Ooh, I like the way this feels on my hand and on my neck,” Kaur said. “She put a few in her mouth and said she liked the way it felt on her teeth. And, she didn’t realize that, as she was putting them on her teeth, that they were slippery and ended up swallowing about 10 of them.”
In the case of the 12-year-old, a girl pretended she had a tongue piercing by putting about four of the magnets on top of her tongue and about four below, Kaur said. Then, while showing her creation off to friends on a Zoom call, she accidentally swallowed them.
The older girl didn’t get to UC Davis until the magnets had moved into her intestines, Kaur said, so they had to monitor her to ensure the tiny balls didn’t tear open her bowel. After the magnets reached an area of the small intestine, Kaur said, she was able to remove them with a minimally invasive endoscopic procedure.
Although the 5-year-old’s family lived several hours from the Sacramento region, her mother had called poison control and had been directed to take her daughter to their local hospital immediately. From there, a helicopter transported the child to UC Davis Medical Center for treatment.
Kaur arrived at the hospital in the wee hours of the night to treat her, but because of the mother’s quick action, it had been only four hours since she had ingested the magnets. Even within that short time-frame, Kaur said, a pressure ulcer had begun to develop near the end of the girl’s esophagus and the beginning of her stomach.
“If the mom had waited longer, and usually it’s about 12 hours after (ingestion), we would have seen what’s called...a fistula,” Kaur said. “They would have found each other and connected to each other where there should be no connection. That can lead to a hole, and she would have gotten peritonitis...and died. These are very dangerous.”
The magnets, compressed into tiny, candy-colored metal balls, are often marketed to adults as a desk toy they can play with to reduce stress. They are often packaged in cubes, made up of rows of beaded magnets, each having a different jewel tones. Advertising videos show how they can be strung together to make different geometric figures.
Kaur and other doctors on the UC Davis pediatric team noted that not all cases turn out so well. They have seen children in excruciating pain, she said, and they have seen air on x-rays, meaning there could be a perforation in the bowel. So, there have been cases where surgeons have had to create holes in a child’s bowel to get the magnets out.
The rare-earth magnets also known as neodymium magnets. If you discover that your child has ingested them, immediately call poison control at 800-222-1222, UC Davis Health doctors said, and go to an emergency room for treatment.
UC Davis doctors noted that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission halted the sale of high-powered magnet sets in 2012 and implemented a regulation that removed them from the market, but the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned that rule four years later.
The UC Davis pediatric team also pointed a January analysis of data from the National Poison Data System published in the Journal of Pediatrics. After reviewing data from 2008-2019 for that paper, researchers found a 444% increase in magnet injuries between 2018 to 2019 when high-powered magnet sets re-entered the market.
This story was originally published April 28, 2021 at 11:08 AM.
