- A 26-year-old inmate in Italy intentionally swallowed a battery and landed in the emergency room, where a heart scan showed abnormalities mimicking a heart attack, although the man didn't have heart-attack symptoms.
- The study authors think the battery affected the man's stomach acid in a way that interfered with his heart scan.
- While past reports have shown ingesting several batteries can affect an electrocardiogram reading, the doctors think this is the first to show a single battery can.
- Most cases of battery ingestion are in children, who are more prone swallowing button batteries and need immediate emergency care.
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A 26-year-old prison inmate in Italy purposefully swallowed a AA battery, and, two hours later, went to the emergency room with stomach pain.
But the battery seemed to affect more than his stomach; an electrocardiogram or ECG showed heart rhythm changes that mimicked those of a serious type of heart attack where a blood clot blocks a coronary artery, a case study published Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine reported.
The man didn't have any heart attack symptoms, though, or other typical markers of a heart attack like an elevated level of a certain protein in the blood.
And while he had a history of borderline and "emotionally unstable" personality disorder, the doctors write, the patient didn't have a history of heart disease or heart problems either.
Once the clinicians removed the battery using a small tube, the ECG abnormalities disappeared. He was discharged six hours later.
The doctors don't know why the single battery led to the ECG changes, but they think it may have altered the man's stomach acid, prompting an electric current to travel to a part of the heart where it can be detected by an ECG.
The case is bizarre, Dr. Beth Dineen, a cardiologist in Orange, California, who was not involved in the study, told Insider. After all, people have pacemakers and other devices in them with batteries that don't interfere with heart scans. She also said it's difficult to speculate why the battery seemed to affect only one heart region.
But the case underscores the importance of looking at the whole picture, she said. If the patient hadn't told doctors about the battery, or it wasn't visible in a chest X-Ray, for instance, he could have undergone an unnecessary cardiac catheterization procedure when what he really needed was the battery to be removed.
"Everything in medicine is about putting the story together, and you wouldn't just make a diagnosis based on one isolated finding," she said.
The study may be the first to show swallowing a single battery can lead to heart scan abnormalities
The study authors, out of two hospitals in Florence, believe the case is the first to show a single battery can lead to abnormalities in a heart scan that look like a heart attack.
Past reports include a 36-year-old man with a history of schizophrenia who swallowed 6 AAA batteries and a 51-year-old man who had several psychiatric disorders and swallowed 13 pencils and 18 AA batteries. Both had abnormal heart scan readings that resolved when the batteries were removed.
Most reports of battery swallowing, however, are in children, who are more prone to ingesting button batteries than the cylindrical Duracell in the case study.
That's dangerous because they can get lodged in a kid's esophagus, where a chemical reaction can cause a burn. Parents should take their kids to the emergency room immediately if that happens.
"The longer you leave it in the esophagus, the more damage there is," Dr. Meghan Arnold, a pediatric surgeon at University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital said on a university health blog. "A (swallowed) coin can wait until the morning to come out; a button battery requires action the moment you find out about it."
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