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Egyptian That Ate His Own Chest Hair And Chewed His Moustache Has Huge 7 lb Hairball Removed From Gut

An Egyptian man who likes to chomp on his moustache and chest hair has had a huge 7lb-ball of hair removed from his stomach.

The 27-year-old man, who was not named, underwent surgery in a hospital in the northern Egyptian governorate of Matrouh after reportedly suffering from pain in his abdomen for several years.

According to the news site Al Watan, the man liked to pluck hair from his chest or bite on his moustache which he then chewed and often swallowed.

Dr. Tariq Al-Kaseh while extracting 3 kilos of hair from the stomach of a 27 year old man in Marsa Matruh city, Egypt in a rare surgery. (Newsflash)

Dr Tariq Al-Kaseh, the surgeon who treated the patient, told Al Watan that he removed a hairball from the 27-year-old man’s stomach that weighed three kilogrammes (6.6 lbs).

The surgeon added that he had never seen anything like it before in Egypt after nearly 40 years in the job.

Dr Al-Kaseh said: “The patient came for an examination when he was young, and I started following up on the case on the grounds that it was a tumour in his abdomen because the TV radiographs confirmed this.

“However, with the follow-up, I noticed the presence of patches on different places on his body, especially his chin, moustache, and chest area, and soon it became clear to me that the young man had been eating his hair for 10 years, which caused a large mass of hair to form inside his stomach, which was causing him severe and continuous pain.”

The surgeon said an operation was the only solution, adding that it lasted around three hours and resulted in the removal of the huge hairball.

Doctors said a tendency to do that was known as Trichophagia, which was described as the compulsive eating of hair that is also associated with hair pulling, known as trichotillomania.

People with trichophagia also eat the hair they pull and in extreme cases this can cause a hairballs known as trichobezoar to form in the gut as with the current case.

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