The hairball that was being surgically removed from the girl’s stomach by surgeons at Duchess of Kent Hospital in Sandakan.
Siti Nasrah and her grandmother at Duchess of Kent Hospital in Sandakan yesterday.
SANDAKAN: Most of us may never have heard of the term ‘trichophagia’ or the habit of eating one’s own hair, which often starts in the form of another compulsive disorder known as ‘trichotillomania’ or the habit of pulling out one’s hair.
A four-year-old girl, Siti Nasrah Binti Abdullah, was found to have the rare disorder and was operated on by a team of surgeons who removed 800 grams of hair from her stomach at the Duchess of Kent Hospital here on December 24 last year.
The girl’s grandmother, in her 50s, told The Borneo Post yesterday that she never knew her granddaughter was suffering from the disorder until she was informed of the discovery of a hairball in the latter’s stomach.
The grandmother took her pale looking girl to the hospital in December after noticing the girl’s stomach was swollen.
“This kind of illness had never crossed my mind when I brought Siti to the hospital after noticing her stomach and face becoming increasingly swollen.
“Prior to the operation, Siti sometimes vomited after taking her meals and told me about the pain in her abdomen,” she said, adding that she had never seen the girl eating her own hair.
Siti, who has been living with her grandmother in Kampung Tabah Baru, Karamunting since she was two years old after her parents divorced, said she does not eat hair anymore after the operation.
According to Dr Vinod Kumar, a consultant surgeon at the Duchess of Kent Hospital’s Surgical Department, the girl was malnourished and suffering from abdominal pain when she was brought to the hospital.
The 800-gram hairball.
“She was brought in with a swollen abdomen. While she was undergoing an ultrasound imaging and Computerized Tomography (CT) scan, we found a foreign mass in her stomach. The girl later underwent an oesophago-gastric-duodeno-scopy (OGDS) procedure.
“The hair accumulated in the gastrointestinal tract, causing symptoms such as indigestion and abdominal pain.
“If the hairball was small, non-invasive methods could be used to remove it. However, we found that the hairball was large and had to be surgically removed,” he said.
Looking at the large extracted hairball intertwined like a bird’s nest, it would seem that the girl had been eating her hair bit by bit for a long time.
This is the first trichophagia case in the Duchess of Kent Hospital and the public may view the video clip showing the operation on the girl on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyMFYUmjyXk.