Today in Weird Patientthe case of a man who swallowed more than a thousand coins!
In 2017, a 51-year-old Japanese man arrived at the hospital closest to his home. The reasons for his visit are not very specific and in no way predict the illness that is really gnawing at him. Depressed for 30 years, he does not take medication, but is more tired than usual and has no appetite. Doctors carry out a battery of preliminary tests which reveal nothing in particular: its pressurepressure blood is normal as well as his heart rate. But his blood tests are more worrying. The patient is anemic, lacks ironiron and has high white blood cell counts. Despite this, there is no sign of a more serious problem such as liver or kidney failure, for example. On palpation, a doctor notices that his abdomen is hard and tense on the right side. The chest scan confirms there is a problem. Perfectly round shapes along her esophagus glow in the images. An impressive quantity of these circles is piled up to the left of thestomachstomachcompletely distorting it.
Doctors are faced with a strange case of a person who ate… coins to the point that they perforated the wall of his intestinal tract. He is transferred to a hospital in Tokyo to have the parts removed from his body. There, surgeons recovered 1,894 Japanese coins, of different denominations, with a total weight of eight kilos. Doctors were unable to determine how long the parts had been in the patient’s digestive system, but the attack was probably recent since he did not have gas poisoning. zinczinc or copper, the main components of the parts.
Eating objects, a confusing disorder
Pica is a psychological disorder in which people eat objects and materials that have no nutritional value and can endanger their lives. Intestinal obstructions, poisoning or infections are possible complications. If cases of pica are rare, theimpactimpact of this confusing behavior is more significant in people with schizophrenia, or even in pregnant women. Our Japanese patient was diagnosed with schizophrenia following his operation and treated in a psychiatric hospital.
Among all the existing forms of pica, that which consists of swallowing coins is quite rare. Doctors who described the case presented above in 2017 documented seven cases between 1975 and 2017, three of which were fatal. Since then, another case has been described in 2021, in a 33-year-old schizophrenic man who ate coins, but also nails, pieces of glass or even stones. The origins of this behavior are still debated. Some think it is a symptomsymptom of a Obsessive Compulsive DisorderObsessive Compulsive Disorderoften associated with schizophreniaschizophrenia ; others, a side effect of medications antipsychoticsantipsychotics.
