A CT scan of a 25-year-old man's abdomen showed several round, bright objects in his stomach. The obvious suspect was undissolved medication, one of the usual explanations when material looks that dense on CT. But the man said he had swallowed nothing that day except the mannitol solution he drank to prepare for the scan.
So his doctors took the question to the lab. In a test tube, they combined artificial stomach juice, artificial bile, and the same 2.5% mannitol solution, and a visible precipitate formed. Their report, published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports on Sept. 5, describes what the authors call a fourth cause of high-density material in the stomach on CT.
