The 38-year-old woman was vomiting, constipated, her abdomen enlarged by accumulated fluids and gas. When doctors operated, they removed a hairball nearly the size of a tennis ball from her stomach and a smaller one from her intestines.
The medical journal "BMJ Case Reports" shared the patient's story this monthas an example of “Rapunzel syndrome,” a condition caused by the compulsive eating of one's own hair. (The patient was given psychiatric and nutritional help, and discharged home after six days.)
Named after the long-haired fairy tale character, Rapunzel syndrome is extraordinarily rare, but the category it belongs to is not. Trichophagia, the eating of hair, is a subset of trichotillomania, which is the compulsive pulling out of one's own hair. And trichotillomania, in turn, belongs to a broader group of disorders, called body-focused repetitive behaviors, or BFRBs, that include skin-picking and are estimated to affect one to three percent of the population.
