A 17-year-old girl with a rare disease in India underwent surgery to remove 4.5 pounds of hair on her abdomen.
On Thursday, a team of doctors in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, performed the operation. The teenager’s family came to Barrampur Hospital due to abdominal pain and gastrointestinal problems. The doctor then performed an ultrasound and CT scan, which revealed an unknown mass in the girl’s stomach.
“I performed an endoscopy and found hairballs. The patient refused to pull her hair, let alone eat her hair. This rare case happened to a mentally unstable person. After many coaxing, the patient finally agreed. She has been doing this kind of compulsion for the past five years,” said Dr. SR Samaddar, who leads the team of surgeons. News 18.
The doctor identified this condition as a psychological disorder called “trichophagia”, which causes the compulsive urge to eat hair. It further leads to Rapunzel syndrome, which is caused by the ingestion of hair. This happens when hair passes through the small intestine and produces a hair tail that comes out of the stomach.
The doctors at the hospital said that it took them an hour and a half to successfully remove the hairballs. The Times of India reported. The identity of the girl has not yet been determined.
“The patient needs consultation, so we recommend providing her with psychiatric help. She also needs at least 10 days of recovery and 5 days of hospital observation,” Dr. Samaddar.
In a similar incident, a 12-year-old girl Experienced Due to this rare disease, nearly 1.5 pounds of hair accumulated in her stomach. This undisclosed girl has been pulling her hair to eat since she was two years old. The constant consumption of hair caused a huge lump to form in her stomach, which made her sick and caused severe pain. “Parents said she started eating hair when she was two years old. At first they didn’t take it seriously until her stomach was so tightly packed with hair that she could not eat normal food, pain and repeated vomiting led to significant weight loss,” Normal And laparoscopic surgeon Dr. Rohit Paryani, he is part of it. The words of the team members who performed the procedure.
