Doctors treating a 78-year-old man for severe pancreatitis with no obvious cause eventually found a metal screw lodged right beside the opening that drains his pancreas. None of his earlier scans had shown it. His acute pancreatitis had worsened into necrotizing pancreatitis, a severe form in which pancreatic tissue dies, and the screw turned up only by chance while doctors were threading a feeding tube into his small intestine.
The case was published Sept. 28 in the ACG Case Reports Journal, a peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Gastroenterology. The authors include surgeons from Sutter Coast Hospital in Crescent City, California. According to their report, the foreign body "had not been detected on previous computed tomography, ultrasound, or abdominal radiography."
