Heart Needle Case: Self-Inserted Foreign Bodies Found in a Man with Intellectual Disability
Doctors in China reported a 35-year-old intellectually disabled man with multiple self-inserted sewing needles scattered throughout his body, including a 36 mm needle that pierced the pericardium and sat inside the left ventricle. Surgeons removed the most dangerous needle near the heart while other needles were monitored, and the patient recovered and remained stable at nine months. The case, published in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders, underscores diagnostic challenges in patients with cognitive impairment and the importance of multimodal imaging for detecting cardiac foreign bodies—a rare finding with only a few dozen prior cases since the 1960s.