(Newser)
– A teenage girl with two rare conditions ended up in the hospital after going through twice and left a huge lighter ball of hair. Live Science reports on the case outside the UK, where a 17-year-old girl was presented to hospital after fainting, her face and head bruised from the resulting falls. According to a documented case study a BMJ case reports, the teen also mentioned that he had had stomach pains for five months, and that they had gotten worse over the past two weeks. A computed tomography showed that the patient had a “severely distended stomach,” as well as a tear in the stomach wall, the result of a tricobezoar (i.e., a giant ball of hair) measuring 19 centimeters. long and had burst in. When doctors operated on her to remove it, they discovered that the mass of her hair was so large that it “formed a breakdown of the entire stomach.”
It turns out that the girl jointly suffered from trichotillomania, a hair stretching disorder that affects between 0.5% and 3% of people, and trichophagia, which consists of eating hair (between 10% and 30% of people with the above disease also have the latter). Not that having these conditions meant the girl had been assigned to the emergency room; only 1% of people with both end up like this teenager, with their hair tangled and trapped in the intestinal tract, an even rarer and sometimes deadly condition called Rapunzel syndrome. The girl was discharged from the hospital a week after the procedure and the study authors described her recovery as “trouble-free”: a month later she was said to be “progressing well with dietary advice” and attending sessions with a psychologist, and there have been no signs of complications. (Read more hairball stories.)