Ludhiana: Clump of hair removed from 6-year-old girl’s intestine
Ludhiana: Clump of hair removed from 6-year-old girl’s intestine Doctors at a private hospital successfully removed a clump of hair from the small intestine of a six-year-old girl, who had pulled her hair and gulped it. The girl, according to doctors was suffering from trichophagiais, compulsive eating of hair associated with trichotillomania. Trichotillomania is a disorder where a person pulls its own hair. Doctors said because of this habit, she had developed Rapunzel syndrome, an extremely rare intestinal condition in humans resulting from ingesting hair (trichophagia). The girl had been eating her hair for the past six months and developed abdomen pain in her intestine after the hair accumulated. The incident came to light when Gurjot started complaining of stomach ache. When Gurjot’s parents took her for a checkup at Anmol Hospital near Pakhowal Road, the doctors conducted an ultrasound and spotted it. Later, when the child underwent endoscopy, doctors came to know that Gurjot was in the habit of swallowing her own hair. On being asked, surgeon Dr Daljeet Singh said, “The children, who feel alone or their parents do not give proper time to them mostly suffer from psychiatric maladies. In this case, parents of Gurjot said that their child had been eating hair for the past six months but, as per the huge size of the bunch, it seems that she had been doing so since her childhood. She was suffering from Rapunzel syndrome”. He said, “The patient was also allergic to wheat”. -PTC News
