(Newser)
– A teenager with two rare diseases ended up in the hospital after passing out twice, and she left a huge hair ball lighter. Live Science reports the case in the UK, where a 17-year-old girl showed up at the hospital after passing out, with her face and head bruised by the resulting falls. For a documented case study in BMJ Case Reports, the teenager also mentioned that she had intermittent stomach pains for five months, and that they had gotten worse in the past two weeks. A CT scan showed that the patient had a “grossly distended stomach” as well as a tear in the stomach wall – the result of a 19-inch long trichobezoar (that is, a giant fur ball) that had ruptured. When doctors operated on it to remove it, they found that the mass of hair was so large that it “formed a mold of the entire stomach”.
It turns out that the girl suffered jointly from trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder that affects between 0.5% and 3% of people, and tricophagy, which involves eating hair (between 10% and 30% of people with the first condition also have the last). Not that having these conditions meant that the girl was destined for the emergency room – only 1% of people with both end up like this teenager, with hair matted and stuck in the intestinal tract, an even rarer, sometimes fatal, disease called Rapunzel syndrome. The girl left the hospital a week after the procedure, and the study’s authors describe her recovery as “uneventful”: One month later, she was “progressing well with dietary advice” and attending sessions with a psychologist, and there were no signs of complications. (Read more hair ball stories.)