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Yingjie Wang

A video report about a young girl eating human hair to gain attention who ended up in hospital has gone viral in mainland China with millions of views on social media.
On Sunday, Lizhi News reported that the nine-year-old girl presented at a local hospital in Suqian, Jiangsu province, eastern China, with symptoms including nausea and vomiting. The gastroenterologist in charge of the girl’s case, Zhao Chengguang, discovered a hairball weighing almost 1kg in the girl’s stomach.
“The hair was mixed with food and gastric juice inside the stomach and had formed a globular shape,” Zhao said.
Doctors removed the hairball in a procedure taking more than 10 hours due to the girl’s young age and narrow oesophagus.

“We then learned that she was trying to get her parents’ attention by swallowing hair,” Zhao said. “So we advised her parents that it would be better to provide her with psychological treatment to prevent it from happening again.”
Many who saw the story were surprised that the parents had not discovered the girl’s mental illness sooner, with many accusing them of being “irresponsible”.
“The parents had really not been caring for the child, so it took them a long time to find out,” one user on Douyin commented.
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“Poor child!,” said another person. “Children who receive insufficient parental care are more likely to develop psychological problems.”
Pica, an abnormal desire to eat things that are not normally eaten as food, is often found among children, according to Zhao, and is usually triggered by psychological issues.
“In addition to providing adequate care and attention to children, parents should also pay attention to their behaviour and guide them with health-related knowledge,” he said.

Earlier this month, a five-year-old girl from Foshan, Guangdong province, southeast China, developed an obsession with eating hair despite her parents’ repeated attempts to stop her.
In December 2020, a 14-year-old girl from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province in eastern China, was found with a one-kilogram hairball in her stomach. The doctor later discovered that the girl had been eating hair for over a year due to a lack of attention from her parents after the birth of their second child.


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A young girl was taken to hospital in China with symptoms including nausea and vomiting
After a 10-hour procedure, they removed a 1kg ball of human hair from her stomach and diagnosed her with the psychological condition Pica



A 9-year-old girl in China has undergone a 10-hour procedure to remove a human hairball after she ate it to attract her parent’s attention due to a psychological condition known as Pica.


China society

Children in China