Doctors remove hairball from girl’s stomach

Samaan Lateef

Tribune News Service

Srinagar January 19

Doctors at Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar conducted laparoscopic surgery on a girl (16) and removed a meter-long hairball from her stomach. The Srinagar girl, who suffers from Rapunzel syndrome, a psychological disorder, was addicted to eating hair.

The doctors removed the hairball with a long tail, accumulated in her stomach and intestines. The girl had a habit of holding her hair in the mouth and plucking hair of the people.

On clinical examination, doctors had found that the frontal hair of the girl was irregular, suggesting the possibility of hair pulling.

The abdominal examination revealed that the teenager had nearly one-meter-long hairball in her stomach.

“She has been addicted to hair eating for the past six years. Abdominal examination through endoscopy revealed a hard, non-tender mass, suggestive of a trichobezoar presence in the stomach and with its tail reaching down to the proximal jejunum,” said Associate Professor, Government Medical College, Srinagar, Iqbal Saleem, who performed the surgery along with his team of doctors.

He and his team discovered that the girl was suffering from Rapunzel syndrome, a rare condition in which a tail-like extension of hairball is found in the stomach and mostly affects young women. The syndrome is named after a long-haired girl Rapunzel in a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.

The girl’s obsession to hair eating had decreased the frequency of her bowel movements, resulted in multiple episodes of vomiting and reduced appetite. “The girl would vomit when she was force-fed,” Dr Saleem said.

Doctors said laparoscopy had been used with a limited success in the extraction of hairballs with long tails. “The great outcome achieved with our patient proves the feasibility and safety of the laparoscopic method to remove the hairballs,” he said, while suggesting this method as the treatment to remove giant hairballs with long tails.

Since Rapunzel syndrome is a psychological disorder, Dr Saleem said the girl would be given psychiatric treatment to come out of the hair eating obsession.

Noted psychiatrist Arshad Hussain said these patients needed extensive treatment and medication to come out of the obsession.