A four-year-old boy was forced to have an emergency operation to unblock his stomach after swallowing 40 pieces of chewing gum.
The child, from Ohio, US started to develop cramps and diarrhoea after the chewing gum clumped together in his stomach and started to block his digestive operation.
Doctors, led by Dr Chizite Iheonunekwu at the Cleveland Clinic, were forced to pull the clump of gum back through his throat after CT scans showed it was lodged in his stomach.
The boy, who has not been named, suffered no long-term effects from the procedure.
However, he was told by medics he was lucky the gum hadn't blocked his intestines, which could have been fatal.
Doctors said if the walls of the bowels were pierced, it could lead to the contents leaking into the body, according to the case published in the medical publication JEM Reports.
In the report, it was stated children coming to hospital with stomach pain and diarrhoea should be examined for "bezoars" - the name for a swallowed foreign material.
According to the boy's mum, on the day of the incident the four-year-old had consumed an entire tub of sugar-free chewing gum.
She immediately called medics who recommended the boy should only go to a local hospital if he had stomach pains.
Just hours later, he developed diarrhoea and stomach pains, which led to the mum taking him to the emergency room.
CT scans showed the boy had a large mass stuck in his stomach, also known as a bezoar, which was taking up nearly 25 per cent of the space.
Medics debated how to treat the boy and eventually decided to remove the mass using multiple "passes" of the oesophagus.
Doctors placed an oesophagoscope, or hollow metal tube, down the throat and used forceps to try and pull off bits of the gum which were later brought back up.
Medics said the procedure took "multiple" attempts to remove the chewing gum as the boy was sedated throughout the operation.
He complained of a sore throat after the treatment but was given painkillers and discharged home.
The boy has suffered no long-term ill effects from the incident.
Doctors have advised against people swallowing chewing gum as the body cannot digest it because it's built out of synthetic polymers and latex, which don't break down easily when ingested.
Dr Elizabeth Rajan, a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic, said: "On very rare occasions, large amounts of swallowed gum combined with constipation have blocked intestines in children.
"It's for this reason that frequent swallowing of chewing gum should be discouraged, especially in children."
