Dentures removed from 65-year-old man’s food pipe

Sixty-five-year-old M. Chinnaiyan from Neelankarai was admitted to the Government Royapettah Hospital for hernia surgery in December.

While in hospital, he realised his ‘gold dentures’ were missing. It appeared he had swallowed them while sleeping.

So, before doctors could perform the hernia surgery, they shifted Chinnaiyan to Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (GGH) where the dentures lodged in his food pipe were removed last week.

S.M. Chandramohan, head, department of surgical gastroenterology at GGH, said, “The endoscopic images showed dentures with two hooks lodged in the food pipe. But they could not be removed through endoscopy. So, we performed a surgery by approaching the dentures through his neck.”

Chinnaiyan was recovering well and would soon be discharged, he said.

Dr. Chandramohan said GGH had seen 66 cases of foreign body ingestion in the past five years, and a majority of the patients — 44 of them — had been men.

“From coins to razor blades, we have found various foreign bodies lodged in the internal organs. But dentures have been the most common object found,” he said.

People usually ingested foreign bodies in their sleep or in a drunken state, he said.

“Once, we got a patient who, after swallowing his denture in a drunken state, got them replaced without bothering about what he had ingested. Six months later, they were found lodged in his food pipe. There was another case of a man who lived for seven and a half years without knowing he had swallowed his dentures,” said Dr. Chandramohan.

People usually ingest foreign bodies in

their sleep or in a drunken state