A British man who has lived with a blocked nose for 44 years has found relief after he sneezed out the cause of the problem – the suction tip of a toy dart that had become lodged in his nose when he was just seven years old.

Steve Easton, 51, has had a regularly blocked nostril – causing headaches and sniffles – for most of his life. He put it down to hay fever, but has now discovered it was the result of an incident when he was seven years old, The Guardian reports.

Sitting at his computer recently, Easton sneezed and out flew a piece of plastic roughly the size of a penny – part of a toy dart. Speaking with his mother she told him that when he was seven she had taken him to a hospital having thought he swallowed a toy dart.

“I started a sneezing fit and it came out of my left nostril,” Easton told The Guardian.

“I thought, ‘What’s this? Where the hell has this come from?’ and pulled out this rubber sucker.

"I spoke to my mum and she said, ‘Oh yes, we took you to hospital when you were seven because we thought you had inhaled one.’”

Mrs Easton said she found Steve playing with a dart gun at their home but noticed one of the rubber tips was missing. Worried her son had swelled the part of the toy she, and Steve’s father Quentin, rushed their son to hospital.

“There was just one of these darts without a tip,” she said.

“I took him to the hospital and they spent a lot of time looking for it but in the end they said perhaps it was a mistake. I knew it wasn’t and it’s always worried me and now it has suddenly shot out. We are all shocked.”

Easton brought the offending item to his doctor who told him “it’s just one of those things,” Easton said.

“It had been there in my nasal cavity for 44 years.

“I was completely unaware that it was in my nose for that long. I feel no different now. I wonder if there’s anything else up there,” he said.