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– A teenager with two rare conditions ended up in hospital after passing out twice, and she left behind a huge hairball lighter. Live Science reports on the case from the UK, where a 17-year-old girl appeared in hospital after passing out, her face and head bruised from the resulting falls. As per one case study documented in BMJ Case Reports, the teenager also said she had had stomach pains for five months, and they had gotten worse in the past two weeks. A CT scan showed that the patient had a “very distended stomach,” as well as a tear in the stomach wall – the result of a trichobezoar (ie, a giant hairball) that was 48 cm long and burst through it. When doctors operated on her to remove it, they found that the hair mass was so large that it “formed a shape of the entire stomach.”
It was found that the girl suffered jointly from trichotillomania, a hair pulling disorder that affects between 0.5% and 3% of people, and trichophagia, where her hair is eaten (between 10% and 30% of those with the first condition also have the last). Not that those conditions predisposed the girl to the emergency room – only 1% of people with both end up as this teen, with her confused and trapped in the intestinal tract, an even rarer, sometimes fatal condition called Rapunzel syndrome . The girl left the hospital a week after the procedure, and the study authors describe her recovery as “uneventful”: a month later she would “make good progress with nutritional advice” and attend sessions with a psychologist. were no signs of complications. (Read more hairball stories.)