Fig 1.
Patient enrolment and the treatment of fish-bone foreign bodies.
Fig 2.
Patients aged 0–4 years formed the largest group and represented 25.9% of the study population.
Fig 3.
Typical images of fish bones in each location.
A: herring bone in the palatine tonsil (upper pole), B: mackerel bone in the palatine tonsil (lower pole), C: flounder bone in the lingual tonsil (tongue base), D: amberjack bone in the posterior wall of hypopharynx, E: barracuda bone in the pyriform sinus, F: flounder bone in the cervical esophagus. Yellow arrows: fish bones.
Table 1.
The locations of the fish-bone foreign bodies.
Table 2.
The number of fish-bone foreign body cases and the ranking of household fresh fish consumption (weight/household/year in 2017–2019) in Japan (Statistics Bureau MoIAaC.
Table 3.
Proportions of cases showing no fish bone or symptoms at the time of presentation.
Fig 4.
The locations (mesopharynx or hypopharynx/esophagus) of the fish bones for each fish type.
The rate of hypopharynx/esophagus cases was significantly higher in the flounder group (flounder vs. the others, p = 0.0059).
Fig 5.
The removal methods of fish-bone foreign bodies.
The proportion of cases involving direct removal was significantly lower in the flounder group (flounder vs. the others, p = 0.0278).
Table 4.
The differences between pediatric patients (<12 years of age) and older patients in relation to sex, location (mesopharynx or other locations), removal methods (endoscopic removal/surgery or other methods), and fish species.