17-Year-Old With Rare Condition Undergoes Surgery To Remove 4.5-Pound Hair Mass From Stomach

A 17-year-old girl in India suffering from a rare condition underwent a surgery to remove 4.5 pound hair mass from her stomach.

A team of doctors in Lucknow, a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh, carried out the procedure Thursday. The teenager's family had approached the Balrampur hospital with abdominal pain and gastrointestinal issues. Doctors then conducted an ultrasound and CT scans, which showed an unidentified lump in the girl’s stomach.

“I performed an endoscopy and the ball of hair was found. The patient was in denial of ever pulling her hair, let alone consuming it. This sort of a rare condition occurs in a mentally unstable person. After a lot of coaxing, the patient finally agreed that she had been doing the obsessive act for the last five years," Dr S.R. Samaddar, who led the team of surgeons, said according to News 18.

The doctors identified the condition as a psychological disorder named trichophagia, which causes a compulsive urge to eat hair. It further leads to Rapunzel Syndrome, caused by the ingestion of the hair. The condition occurs when the hair passes through the small intestine and produces a tail of hair, which goes out of the stomach.

Doctors at the hospital said it took them one and half hours to successfully complete the removal of the hair mass, The Times of India reported. The girl has not been identified.

“The patient requires counselling and so we have advised psychiatric help for her. She will also need at least 10 days of healing and five days of hospital observation," Dr Samaddar.

In a similar incident, a 12-year-old girl underwent a surgery to remove nearly 1.5 pounds of hair that had accumulated in her stomach due to the rare condition. The girl, whose identity was not revealed, had been pulling out and eating her own hair since she was two years old. The constant consumption of hair led to the formation of a large mass in her stomach that made her sick and caused severe pain. “The parents said she started eating hair from the age of two. Initially they didn’t take it seriously until her stomach was so tightly packed with the hair that she was unable to eat normal food, had pain and recurrent vomiting causing significant weight loss,” general & laparoscopic surgeon Dr. Rohit Paryani, who was part of the team that conducted the procedure, was quoted as saying.