Lego, a portmanteau of Danish words meaning “play well”, are ubiquitous toys around the world. This means the bite-sized bits are equally prevalent in the hands of infants and toddlers around the world – and in their mouths. What goes in a toddler’s mouth goes into their stomach.
This brief study evaluates six toddlers – ahem, pediatricians – who each swallowed a Lego head:
These adult children subsequently searched stools for signs of the swallowed item, as well as performed an assessment of stool consistency. Most importantly, they were able to derive infantile acronyms for their assessments – the SHAT and FART scores.
One of the six participants was never able to locate the ingested Lego part, despite two weeks of stool searching. The other five found them in their second or third bowel movement, which, on average, was 1.71 days later. Stool consistency was unrelated to passage of the head.
Obviously, the generalizability and reliability of such a study is quite low, being adults and only six of them. Then, although these authors report “no complications”, they have not yet located one of the six heads – perhaps a future case report: “Acute appendicitis involving an unusual appendicolith”? At the least, a potential future IgNobel prize awardee.
“Everything is awesome: Don’t forget the Lego”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jpc.14309
Thank you for this. It made my night.