A man in his 50s was eating breakfast when pain began around his belly button. By the time surgeons in Japan opened his abdomen, they had found the cause deep in his small intestine: four connected pieces of konjac, each about 2 centimeters long.
The case, published April 17, 2026, in the Journal of Surgical Case Reports, comes from Yoshitaka Ooya and Masahito Kaji of the emergency and acute medicine department at Saitama Medical University International Medical Center. They describe konjac-related small bowel obstruction as "exceptionally uncommon, with only a few cases documented in the English literature."
