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Doctors in China removed a hairball weighing more than 6.6 lbs from the stomach and intestines of a 14-year-old girl who plucked and ate her own hair.
The unidentified teenager, from Xian in Shaanxi province, almost went bald because of her addiction to eating her own hair. She could no longer eat until doctors performed the surgery, Times Now reported Tuesday.
The girl was being looked after by her grandparents after her parents relocated to a different part of the country for work. The grandparents didn’t realize the girl was pulling out her hair and eating it until she could no longer consume food.
Shi Hai, the gastroenterologist from Xian Daxing Hospital team who performed the surgery, said doctors performed a nearly 2-hour surgery on the girl to remove the hairball,
“She came to us because she couldn’t eat. We then found that her stomach was filled with so much hair that there was no more room for food, and her intestine was also blocked,” said Shi, as quoted by South China Morning Post.
During the surgery, doctors removed enough hair that clumped up into a hairball weighing 6.6 lbs – the same as a brick.
Shi further explained the teenager suffered from a condition known as Pica, which made her addicted to eating her own hair. The doctor added the girl may have had psychological issues.
“She lives with her grandparents, who haven’t paid enough attention to her behavior. She may have suffered psychological issues for many years. So I hope, more generally, that parents can spend more time with those left-behind children,” Shi pointed out.
Pica is described as an eating disorder that makes someone compulsively swallow or eat things that are not food, according to Cleveland Clinic.
The mental health condition is more commonly seen among children and is treatable with therapy and modification to lifestyle and circumstances in most cases. The condition is harmless unless a person with the condition swallows something toxic or dangerous. Some of the non-food items that people with pica commonly eat include ash, talcum powder, chalk, charcoal, soil, dirt, eggshells, feces, paper, soap, cloth, and hair.
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