A 15-year-old girl from Henan, China, has spent the past six years swallowing hair, which led to the formation of a massive 2.4kg hairball that almost completely filled her stomach. The condition caused her severe anemia, abdominal pain, and loss of appetite, but doctors successfully removed the mass through surgery, and she has since recovered and been discharged.
According to Taiwan’s United Daily News, the teenager, nicknamed Nini, stands 1.6 meters tall but weighed only 35kg. She had not menstruated for six months, often complained of stomach pain, and her food intake had drastically reduced. On July 12, she visited Wuhan Children’s Hospital with her mother.
Dr. Chen Qiong, deputy chief of the hospital’s gastroenterology department, found that Nini was extremely pale, with no color in her nail beds. Her hemoglobin level was just 59g/L—far below the normal range for females, which is between 115–150g/L—indicating severe anemia. Ultrasound scans suggested a possible gastric bezoar.
Her mother later revealed that Nini had developed a habit of eating hair since the age of nine, which immediately raised alarms for the medical team. A gastroscopy confirmed that her stomach was almost entirely occupied by a large, hardened mass of hair, with an ulcer about the size of an egg forming on the stomach lining—explaining her anemia and pain.
Doctors initially attempted to remove the mass via endoscopy, but its sheer size and hardness made this impossible. On July 14, Dr. Zhu Zhenchuang, deputy chief of hepatobiliary surgery, performed an open operation. The team found that her stomach had expanded to nearly twice its normal size, and upon incision, released a foul odor. Inside was a black, compact hairball mixed with food debris, about the size of a small watermelon.
To avoid damaging the stomach wall, surgeons carefully cut and removed the hairball in fragments. The surgery lasted two hours, and about 2.4kg of hair was extracted.
Fortunately, Nini’s condition improved significantly after the operation. By July 19, she had regained her appetite and was discharged, and by her follow-up on August 5, her complexion and digestion had improved markedly.
Dr. Zhu explained that Nini suffers from “Rapunzel syndrome,” a rare form of pica—a disorder in which patients compulsively eat non-food items. Because hair is made of keratin and indigestible, it accumulates over time, forming dangerous hairballs that interfere with digestion, leading to malnutrition and anemia.
