Oct. 01--SEOUL -- A team of South Korean doctors reported recently that they have succeeded in removing a huge gastric bezoar from a 61-year-old man's stomach by injecting cola.
The man, surnamed Kim, was admitted to a local hospital, complaining upper abdominal pain. He had taken digestive medicines four days earlier but the pain had gotten worse.
The doctors at Hanil General Hospital in Seoul examined his stomach with an endoscope and found a dark brown stone, 10 centimeters by 8 centimeters in size.
Bezoars are a mass consisting of indigestible materials trapped in the gastrointestinal system, usually the stomach. Depending on their ingredients, they are divided into plant bezoars composed of food items such as seeds, fruit pith and pits, those formed from hair, and mixed ones. (People who frequently consume hair, especially children, have to have hairballs removed if they are very large.)
They are usually eliminated from the body without complications but some bigger ones can cause gastric conditions such as stomach ulcers and gastrointestinal bleeding.
They can be removed by surgery or medication. The most common type of treatment is endoscopic surgery because it does not cause complications and can be performed immediately upon detection of a gastric bezoar.
However, the man who visited the hospital few months ago had a large and hard bezoar which was not easy to remove, the doctors said.
After a polypectomy snare failed to snatch the firmly trapped stone, they injected 30 milliliters of cola in several stages directly to the mass. Ninety minutes after the injection of the carbonated soft drink, the bezoar started to break down into pieces and it was removed completely.
"Coke is an acidic solution with a pH of 2.6, which is close to the normal gastric acid of pH 1 to 2. So it could break the stone into pieces.
"And the carbon dioxide bubbles from its sodium bicarbonate and carbonic acid is also believed to have softened the fibrous mass," the doctors said in their study report, which was published in the Korean Journal of Medicine.
It was not the first time that the carbonated soft drink has been used in removing such gastric bezoars.
In 2008, a team at Samsung Medical Center also used cola to treat a 20-something woman who had a huge gastric stone in her stomach due to over-consumption of persimmons. A few international cases have been reported too.
While similar cases previously took two to 13 days for the complete removal of the stone, the latest case of Hanil Hospital took only 90 minutes by adopting argon plasma beam electrosurgery. The patient was given permission to leave the hospital after two days of hospitalization, the team added.
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