Girl With Rapunzel Syndrome Ends Up In Need Of Surgery



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(Journalist)
– A teenage girl with two rare diseases ended up in the hospital after she passed out twice, and left a huge hairball lighter. Live Science reports the case outside the UK, where a 17-year-old girl presented to hospital after fainting, her face and head bruised from the resulting falls. According to a case study documented in BMJ Case Reports, the teenager also mentioned that she had had stomach pains intermittently for five months and had worsened 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 trichobezoar (ie a giant hairball) that measured 19 inches long and that had burst. When doctors operated on her to remove it, they discovered that the hair mass was so large that it “made a plaster cast of the whole stomach.”

It turns out that the young girl suffered jointly from trichotillomania, a hair pulling disorder that affects between 0.5% and 3% of people, and trichophagia, which consists of eating her hair (between 10% and 30%). % of people with the first disease also have the last). Not that having these conditions meant the girl was meant for the emergency room – only 1% of people with both end up like this teenager with hair tangled and trapped in the intestinal tract, an even rarer, sometimes fatal condition. , called Rapunzel syndrome. The girl was discharged from the hospital a week after the procedure, and the study authors describe her recovery as “uneventful”: a month later, she was said to be “making good progress with dietary advice” and was attending sessions with a psychologist, and there were no signs of complications. (Read more furball stories.)



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