Take off a piece of Lego takes less time than you think

We talked a lot about the dangers of walking on Lego bricks with bare feet, but there is another potential danger lurking in a plastic paradise: accidentally swallowing a piece. So exactly how long will it take to emerge on the other end?

An international team of researchers associated with pediatric medical blog Don & # 39; t Forget the Bubbles has embarked on an unprecedented experiment to answer this question. Six doctors swallowed a Lego's head and then rummaged through their own trash to determine how long it took to pull the plastic out.

Each doctor recorded a Time Found and Time Recovered score – yes, a FART score – which corresponds to an average of 1.71 days. "A toy object is rapidly passing through uncomplicated adult subjects," the team concluded in a study published online last week in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health.

The researchers hope that this information will help reassure worried parents, although the study has reservations. The doctors made it clear that the study was not particularly rigorous, recognizing that it was "a little fun to get ready before Christmas".

The group also warned that data collected on adult subjects might not apply to children who ingest pieces of Lego and that the sample size was too small to draw general conclusions about "l & rsquo; Whole population of Lego swallowers ".

The study was not without result inducing discomfort: one of the swallowed Lego heads was still missing at the end of the two weeks. The doctors, however, were not very worried about the disappearance.

"Maybe someday, in many years, a gastroenterologist practicing a colonoscopy will find her in front of him," they wrote.

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