Henry: I came up with the acronyms kind of on the spot, about the Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) test and the Found and Retrieved Time (FART)
Andy: We decided we could just do a waiver of consent, because we’re all just doing it to ourselves, as opposed to trying to get ethics approval for doing it to our children. In the same way that you know, Barry Marshall swallowed Helicobacter just to find out if it would give him stomach ulcers, we just thought we’d just carry on and do the same sort of thing.
We discussed at the study design phase about mitigating the risk of corn in our diets—acknowledging the risk of a false positive.
After five of the six pediatric healthcare professionals had gone to extraordinary lengths to find and rescue their excreted Legos, all eyes turned to the sixth, whose Lego was nowhere to be found.
Damian: It turns out my colleagues did a proper, like, break open the poo and see if it was there. Clearly I’d not been that enthusiastic or that diligent. I kind of looked at it, maybe prodded it around, but I certainly wasn’t going to open up the poo to see if it was inside
Henry: It was his reflection that he might not have looked adequately over the first couple of motions, which is regrettable.
It’s one of my frustrations with the study, is that we have a very high suspicion that he passed it early. But the interpretation is that it was not found and therefore could still be inside him, which is the exact opposite of the core message that we wanted to deliver
Andy: The Christmas BMJ said no outright.
Tessa: They don’t allow self-experimentation.
Andy: We actually got rejected six times from different journals.
Henry: Rejection is just part of academic writing.
Damian: We were a bit worried that it wasn’t going to get published anywhere.
Henry: We started off as a website. We do blogs. We could have put this on our own blog, and we could have just left it at that.
Jennifer MacDonald (Director of Communications, Americas, at the LEGO Group): The study came out four years ago in 2018 for a special Christmas edition of the Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health but the LEGO Group wasn’t involved in putting it together.