A 16-Year-Old Girl’s Stomach Pain Turned Out to Be a Giant Hairball

A 16-year-old girl’s mysterious gastrointestinal unwellness turned retired to person an particularly hairy culprit down it. Doctors discovered that a elephantine hairball stuck successful her tummy was the origin of her problems.

The girl’s doctors detailed the existent beingness communicative of assemblage fearfulness successful a insubstantial published this week successful the New England Journal of Medicine, arsenic portion of a regular conception highlighting antithetic cases that walk done the halls of the Massachusetts General Hospital successful Boston. The lawsuit is simply a uncommon illustration of a known information called Rapuznel syndrome, 1 that tin person life-threatening complications if not caught aboriginal enough. While the miss did person to endure weeks of worsening symptoms earlier the find was made, the doctors were capable to successfully region her hairball with nary issues.

According to the report, the miss and her household visited a section exigency section 4 weeks aft she began experiencing occasional bouts of vomiting and tummy symptom that yet became excruciating (when asked to complaint her symptom connected a standard from 1 to 10, she responded 8). Her archetypal check-up failed to find immoderate wide origin for her illness, and she was sent location with medications to dainty the symptoms. The medications did small to soothe her pain, which astatine times would aftermath her up from sleeping. Following much weeks of continued illness, which included a 2nd travel to the aforesaid ED that yielded nary answers, the miss was yet seen by the doctors astatine Mass General.

Given the deficiency of different explanations, and the information that her symptoms often lessened close aft she vomited, her doctors yet suspected that she had gastric outlet obstruction, a information caused by a carnal blockage betwixt the tummy and tiny intestine. Often, this blockage is from a bezoar, a aesculapian word for immoderate wide of overseas worldly that gets trapped successful the body, but which is usually made of hairsbreadth oregon fiber.

To find retired for sure, the doctors sent down a conduit and camera to analyse her precocious gastrointestinal tract, and that’s erstwhile their suspicions were confirmed. The miss had a hefty trichobezoar (hairy bezoar) successful her tummy that had started to tangle its mode into the tiny intestine. While immoderate trichobezoars are truthful large that they tin lone beryllium removed surgically from the body, the doctors were capable to safely extract the hairsbreadth that extended into the tiny intestine and region the girl’s hairball done the conduit alone. (For those with an NEJM subscription, here’s a link to the picture, but just warning: It’s rather gnarly.)

Hairballs successful humans are usually caused by trichophagia, a signifier of disordered eating successful which radical consciousness compelled to swallow their hair. Trichophagia tends to beryllium accompanied by trichotillomania, oregon the compulsion to propulsion retired one’s ain hair. But erstwhile interviewed, the miss denied that she pulled her hair. Though determination person been uncommon cases of trichobezoars not tied to trichotillomania, the doctors enactment that radical often consciousness shame astir having the information and whitethorn not admit to it, truthful it’s inactive imaginable that this was the basal origin of her hairball. Thankfully, the girl’s carnal betterment went smoothly, with nary lingering tummy symptom reported a period later. And portion she did diminution a referral to a scientist made by the doctors, she told them that she was readying to spot a hypnotherapist recommended by her friends.

Cases of Rapunzel syndrome are rare, but amazingly enough, this isn’t the archetypal 1 to marque waves successful 2024. Earlier this July, doctors successful Ecuador reported extracting a two-pound hairball from a woman’s stomach.