Can you swallow dentures

Button batteries may be small and smooth, but their electrochemical properties make them extremely dangerous once they start to be digested. How easy it is to find. Not everything that makes its way into one's body will show up on an x-ray. A swallowed object's visibility therefore factors into how concerning the incident is. And while doctors, through some combination of CT scans and, in some cases, metal detectors, are usually able to figure out where a foreign body has landed, some people might not even realize that there's something that needs to be found see, again, "Where Are My Teeth?

Parcels hidden in the stomachs of body packers, of course, don't want to be found, and according to a review of CT techniques , "may go undetected unless a high degree of suspicion exists.

Sometimes, these things are just unavoidable, and once you've swallowed a drill bit, as occurred for an unfortunate dental patient this fall in Sweden, you're just going to have to deal with the consequences. While not as common as denture ingestion, this type of dental incident is apparently not without precedent.

As the medical chief of the hospital in question said, with one would imagine a resigned shrug, "Unfortunately, drills are going to be dropped every now and then. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. His chest pain and difficulty swallowing kept getting worse and after three more days, in December , he went to the gastroenterology department of his local hospital to find out what was wrong with him. By that time, the man realized that he might have swallowed the broken part of his denture during a seizure, and this was probably the reason for his symptoms, said Dr.

Vinoth Boopathy, a gastroenterologist at Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute in Puducherry, India, who treated the man and co-authored the case report. The man underwent a chest X-ray, which revealed that the clasp of the denture was lodged in the lower end of his esophagus the muscular tube connecting the mouth and stomach. One edge of the denture had penetrated the wall of the esophagus , but it wasn't deep enough to cause a hole in the wall, he explained.

The denture had apparently become dislodged during his seizure and had broken into two pieces — the larger piece slid down his throat, and the smaller piece fell to the floor. The accidental swallowing of a denture normally constitutes a medical emergency, and healthcare workers usually remove the denture on the same day the ingestion occurs, the doctors wrote in their case report.

That being said, it can still happen and has already happened to a few people. People have long wondered if swallowing dentures was a real risk, but tensions reached a peak a few days ago when a year-old British man had to undergo surgery to remove his dentures that had become lodged in his throat.

Eight days prior to the incident, the patient went through a separate surgery to remove a benign lump in his stomach. At some point during the procedure, his dentures came loose and slid down his throat — becoming lodged — without any of the surgeons noticing. The patient was under anesthesia, thus his gag reflex was unable to keep the dentures out. Six days following the initial surgery, the British man came back to the hospital because he was unable to swallow solid food and noticed some blood within his mouth.

After a chest X-ray, he was diagnosed with pneumonia then prescribed antibiotics and steroids. All complications were slight mucosal damage to the GI tract. There were no severe complications such as perforation. There were 2 cases 1 crown and 1 partial denture of removal failure. In the case with a crown, we could not detect it by endoscopy, and plain radiography showed that it had moved into the jejunum.

This patient was followed up by plain radiography, and the crown was detected in the cecum 1 week later; the patient passed the crown 51 days later. The other case of failure had an impacted partial denture in the cervical esophagus. Using grasping forceps, we attempted to retrieve it endoscopically.

However, it was firmly embedded in the esophageal wall. In this case, the risk of perforation was high, so surgical removal was the only possible treatment. The partial denture was successfully removed by cervical incision; the patient recovered uneventfully and was discharged on the thirteenth postoperative day. The present study retrospectively analyzed the endoscopic removal of dentures and dental instruments in consecutive cases for about 5 years.

The inadvertent swallowing of dentures is not a rare incident in dentistry. Many previous investigators have reported it in case reports [ 6 , 8 — 22 ].

However, the safety and efficacy of endoscopic removal of dentures and dental instruments have not been discussed thoroughly. Our study is the first to focus on the clinical practice of endoscopically removing foreign dental bodies. Our hospital provides dentistry; hence, the cases of ingested dental objects were referred to us directly.

To achieve favorable outcomes in cases of accidental ingestion, immediate action by the dentist is essential. Complications of endoscopic removal such as tears and perforations of the GI tract are also important issues. In our study, there were no severe complications; furthermore, slight mucosal damage occurred in 5 patients. Among these patients, the ingested dental objects included 3 bridges, 1 partial denture, and 1 fractured clasp.

This indicates that the risk of mucosal injury is associated with the size of the foreign body, because crowns and dental instruments are generally smaller than bridges and partial dentures. In addition, there were no cases of injury among these aforementioned patients.

To decrease the rate of complications, it is presumed that the choice of distal attachment is important. Distal attachments were used in 25 patients during endoscopic removal in this study [ 23 , 24 ]. Dentures with clasps or interproximal extensions may cause injury, especially in a narrow segment [ 25 ]. When the end of the sharp part points toward the proximal side, the risk of injury during the retrieval procedure is increased.

Therefore, this distal attachment provides a protective cover from the sharp parts and a better visual field. To remove partial dentures, we only used grasping forceps. The retrieval net is an effective device for large and slippery foreign bodies.

However, when foreign bodies have sharp parts, their sharp parts may stick out through the mess of the retrieval net and thus injure GI tracts. Therefore, the choice of retrieval devices requires attention, depending on the shape of the foreign body [ 27 ]. In the current study, there were 1 case with a crown and 1 case with a metal core detected in the cecum.

The case with a crown that was conservatively followed up after removal failure showed prolonged stagnation in the cecum for more than 1 month. According to previous reports, there have been cases of colorectal impaction and perforation. Therefore, when the foreign body fails to resolve on its own, endoscopic removal should be considered [ 7 ].

The limitation of this study was its single-center, retrospective design. To determine the risk of endoscopic removal-associated complications for dental objects, large, prospective, multicenter studies are needed.

The authors declare that there are no competing interests regarding the publication of this manuscript. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Article of the Year Award: Outstanding research contributions of , as selected by our Chief Editors. Read the winning articles. Journal overview. Special Issues.

Academic Editor: Yusuke Sato. Received 16 May Accepted 28 Aug Published 22 Sep Abstract Background. Introduction Foreign body ingestion is one of the most common problems for gastroenterologists in terms of performing emergency endoscopy.

Materials and Methods Twenty-nine consecutive patients with 29 ingested dental objects who were treated at the Niigata University Medical and Dental Hospital from August to December were retrospectively reviewed.