| Summary: | Spherical rare-earth magnet toys are commonly ingested by children. This can result in perforation and fistulas of the bowel if the magnets are attracted to one another across the walls of two separate intestinal loops. These injuries can be life-threatening if they occur acutely, but they can also form in a chronic manner with a delayed presentation. Here, we present the case of a child with the incidental radiographic finding of ingested small-diameter (2.5-mm) spherical magnets that required combined endoscopic and surgical exploration and retrieval, that were found to be associated with chronic enteroenteric and enteromesenteric fistulas and a hair, vegetable and metal bezoar. We review the biophysics of the attraction of magnetic spheres as a function of size and note that the force between them scales as the square of the radius of the spheres. We speculate that the small size of the ingested beads in this case led to a slow fistulization process between bowel loops analogous to the therapeutic use of magnets for “magnamosis.”
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