Intra-abdominal needles: an enigma (a report of two cases)

Ingested sharp metallic bodies perforate the gut surprisingly rarely. Perforation and migration of such a foreign body may be silent. Patients may present with unrelated symptoms and the discovery of foreign body on radiological examination of the abdomen may come as a surprise. History of ingestion is usually difficult to obtain. Foreign bodies after perforation have been reported to migrate to almost any intraabdominal or rarely to even extra-abdominal sites. Migration to the liver, mesentery or the anterior abdominal wall, however, is extremely rare. We report two cases of young women with two ingested needles in each which perforated silently and in one case migrated to the liver and the anterior abdominal wall while in the other they migrated to the mesentery of the small intestine and the anterior abdominal wall.