14-year-old girl from China tore out and ate 3 kg of hair (3 photos)

Chinese surgeons performed a two-hour operation to remove hairball weighing 3 kg from the stomach and intestines of a teenage girl. The girl suffers from obsessive eating torn from her own head hair. These are two mental disorders at once - trichotillomania and trichophagy.





Trichotillomania is an obsessive desire to pull out one's hair head or other parts of your own body. seen in people with mental problems, but can also develop against the background of stress, neurosis. According to statistics, this disorder is twice as likely to be diagnosed in women.

Trichophagia - eating one's own hair, most often combined with the above trichotillomania, but can also occur separately from it.

Experts believe that if such a disease has developed in child, the cause may be a mental trauma that caused neurosis or depression. Since the medicines for this misfortune does not exist, hope only for psychotherapy and antidepressants.



The case of a 14-year-old girl from China is just a classic of this unpleasant diseases. He drew public attention to the plight so-called "abandoned children" in China, according to the Chinese media.

The child lived under the supervision of grandparents, and the parents moved to another part of the country for work. Grandparents did not notice that with something is wrong with a girl until she is practically bald and I started to stop eating completely. Only at this moment they I suspected it was time to take her to the doctor.

Surgeons performed an operation that lasted two hours and removed from stomach from the intestines a huge amount of hair (3 kilograms is about the weight of a brick). No wonder the girl could not eat. her stomach was so full that there was simply no room for food. The intestines were also blocked.



“She lives with her grandparents who do not pay her due attention. She may have suffered from psychological problems for many years. I wish parents could spend more time with such “abandoned children,” said a gastroenterologist at the hospital where the operation took place.

"Abandoned children" in China are those whose parents are forced left to work in other parts of the country. And this girl is one of tens of millions of "abandoned children" in China's vast rural areas.

According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, in 2020, of all students receiving nine years of compulsory schooling in country, usually between the ages of six and 15, almost 13 million were rural children abandoned by their parents.