Doctors recently took a 10-pound hairball from an 18-year-old woman after she came to them with pain and a 40-pound weight loss. The New England Journal of Medicine said the woman had been suffering with pain in her abdomen for about five months. Doctors found a mass there, and when they used a small camera, found that the hairball was taking up nearly her entire stomach. The patient said that she has a habit of eating her own hair, a condition called trichophagia. Doctors tried to use small incisions to remove the mass, but then had to go to traditional surgery to make sure the entire hairball was removed. The journal’s report said the girl left the hospital after five days and was asked to follow up with a psychiatrist. Within a year, she had regained about half of the weight she lost and said she had stopped eating her hair.

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