Soft-tissue textiloma: a potential diagnostic pitfall.

Abstract

The reported frequency of accidentally forgotten foreign bodies in surgery varies between 1 in 1000 and 1 in 10 000 interventions.1 The real incidence of retained gauze is hard to determine because of difficulty in obtaining an accurate figure for the occurrence of new cases. Moreover, most patients with retained intra-abdominal gauze may remain asymptomatic, and its presence may be discovered incidentally after many years.2 We report such a case of a textiloma that was found many years after the initial causative procedure.