“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, leave your hair!”
A 17-year-old woman from the UK is recovering very well after doctors discovered that a ball of hair a foot and a half long had literally broken her stomach.
A new report in BMJ Case Reports describes the horrific circumstances of the teenager with “Rapunzel” syndrome, who compulsively consumed his own hair, enough to accumulate a ball of hair, called tricobezoar in the clinical setting, which made 19 inches long, which filled it all. stomach, according to doctors at Queen’s Medical Center in Nottingham.
The patient was taken to hospital after two mysterious episodes of fainting that left her face injured. Doctors quickly ruled out that he was to blame for a head injury after detecting swelling in the woman’s upper abdomen. He had also described intermittent abdominal pain during the previous five months, which had worsened during the two weeks prior to hospitalization.
A computed tomography (CT) scan then revealed a large mass inside his “very distended stomach” and a tear in the organ lining, at which point the patient’s mental health struggles became evident.
The teenager had a well-known history of trichotillomania, characterized by the urge to remove hair, as well as trichophagia, which is the compulsive eating of hair.
Both conditions are rare, as only 0.5% and 3% of people experience trichotillomania; it is estimated that between 10% and 30% of trichotillomania cases are accompanied by trichophagia, LiveScience reported. And a study conducted in 2019 in Pancreas noted that, of those suffering from both disorders, only 1% will develop a hairball in the gastrointestinal tract.
The hairy specimen had grown so large that, after surgical removal, doctors discovered that the tricobezoar “had formed a distribution of the entire stomach,” they wrote.
The patient is lucky: hairballs of this magnitude have been fatal, as happened with a 16-year-old girl from the UK in 2017, who died of Rapunzel syndrome after tricobezoar caused a lethal infection.
After psychiatric evaluation and postoperative healing, the woman was released in just seven days after the procedure. A month later, doctors reported that he was “progressing well with dietary advice” and that he was visiting a therapist regularly.
