It may not be the most appetizing reading before a hearty holiday meal, but the New England Journal of Medicine is devoting part of its Thanksgiving issue to a giant hairball -- and not the feline kind.
Doctors say this hairball removed from a woman's stomach weighed 10 pounds.
The prestigious journal details the case of a previously healthy 18-year-old woman who consulted a team of gastrointestinal specialists.
She complained of a five-month history of pain and swelling in her abdomen, vomiting after eating and a 40-pound weight loss.
After a scan of the woman's abdomen showed a large mass, doctors lowered a scope through her esophagus.
It revealed "a large bezoar occluding nearly the entire stomach," wrote Drs. Ronald M. Levy and Srinadh Komanduri, gastroenterologists at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois.
For the uninitiated, a bezoar is a ball of swallowed foreign material.
"On questioning, the patient stated that she had had a habit of eating her hair for many years -- a condition called trichophagia," they wrote.
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"It seemed like she'd been doing this for several years," Levy told CNN.
The woman underwent surgery to remove the mass of black, curly hair, which weighed 10 pounds and measured 15 inches by 7 inches by 7 inches, the doctors said.
Five days later, she was eating normally and was sent home.
A year later, the pain and vomiting were gone, the patient had regained 20 pounds "and reports that she has stopped eating her hair."
Reached at his home in Chicago, Levy said he had no idea whether the journal's timing of the publication on Thanksgiving was intentional.
Either way, he said, it would not affect the gastroenterologists' holiday dinner plans -- "We don't get fazed by much."
3 comments:
This has to be one of the strangest stories I have ever read. One question i have that the article didn't answer was why exactly was this 18 year old woman eating her hair? I can't possibly understand why she would be eating her own hair. Also it is pretty strange that the doctors diagnosed the hair in her stomach months after it began forming. It seems that having a giant 10 pound hair ball in your stomach is a great way to lose wait. The ball caused her to lose 40 pounds because the food she was eating didn;t have anywhere to go so therefore, she didn't have stable eating habits.
Did this woman have a sickness? Why didnt someone check her out as soon as they found out she was eating her hair!!? We all know eating hair is not healthy, I think its just stupid to wait last minute to check these kind of things out...
I totally agree with both Stevens and Anika. What kind of person would eat their own hair? That's just not normal. Whyy didnt anyone check it out? If this was indeed habit of hers she should have got checked out awhile ago. The photo was quite disturbing and unnatural for a woman 2 eat 10 pounds of her own hair. Did she have any left on her head????
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