Mumbai: Doctors remove 750 grams of hair from 20-year-old’s stomach

A team of doctors at Rajwadi hospital in Ghatkopar in Mumbai were able to remove around 750 g of hair from a 20-year-old girl's stomach who was addicted to eating her own hair.

The girl was brought to the hospital after she was suffering from nausea and a swollen abdomen, despite she was losing weight drastically in the last few months.

During a CT scan, the doctor who checked her spotted that she was suffering from rare Rapunzel Syndrome, which has only ever been documented 88 times in medical literature the world over (as of October 2016). Because of which, the girl was weighing only 30kg.

Moreover, a tail of hair trailed into her intestine. The tail was 103 cm long, extending well into the small intestines. The hairball itself was 25 cm long and about 10-12 cm across.

This led the doctors to believe that the girl had been eating her hair for years. This addiction of eating hair is called Trichophagia, which is associated with trichotillomania (hair pulling). Hair protein does not get digested, nor can the body pass it in stool.

OneIndia News