@article{ref1,
title="Cocaine poisoning from transport of the drug in the gastrointestinal tract (the body-packer syndrome)",
journal="Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift",
year="1992",
author="John, Hubert and Schoenenberger, R. and Renner, N. and Ritz, R.",
volume="117",
number="51-52",
pages="1952-1955",
abstract="Three days after arriving in Switzerland from Bolivia a 35-year-old man presented at a casualty department. He was anxious, agitated and hallucinating, and he expressed delusional ideas of being poisoned. As a general physical examination was without abnormal findings he was thought to suffer from a psychiatric disorder. It was only when he had evacuated in stool a long oval foreign body, packed in plastic sheeting and filled with a dark paste, that cocaine poisoning due to cocaine transport in the gastrointestinal tract (body packer syndrome) was suspected. Plain X-ray of the abdomen revealed numerous regular structures of poor X-ray contrast and the urine contained cocaine metabolites, confirming the tentative diagnosis. As the patient's state of consciousness deteriorated and he had a grand mal seizure, an emergency laparotomy was performed. 78 packages (two of them had opened) were removed by gastro- and caecotomy. Total cocaine weight was 650 g. He was discharged from hospital after 11 days, free of symptoms.<p /> <p>Language: de</p>",
language="de",
issn="0012-0472",
doi="",
url="http://dx.doi.org/"
}