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Surgeons have removed a huge lump of hair the weight of a bag of apples from a little girl's stomach after she complained of a severe tummy ache.
Doctors discovered a 3.3lb (1.5kg) mass inside the six-year-old's tummy when it started to swell up.
It is understood the build-up happened after the girl in Panchkula, India, started sucking or chewing on her own hair.
Dr. Vivek Bhadhoo successfully performed surgery to remove the hair mass at Civil Hospital in Panchkula on Monday (24 January).
The little girl is now under observation in a stable condition with her parents by her side as doctors monitor her movement and check on her health conditions, a source said.
While the reason for her hairball-gathering habit was not given by doctors, swallowing your own hair can be the result of a mental condition named trichophagia.
It is also known as 'Rapunzel syndrome', after the famous fairy tale character who let down her hair to lift would-be suitors to her tower.
It is closely related to another more common disorder called trichotillomania or 'hair-pulling disorder' where people compulsively pull out their own hair without consuming it.
The six-year-old's case is the latest to be reported from India, where doctors revealed back in 2020 that they had found a 15lb (7kg) hair lump inside a teenager's stomach.
A massive ball of hair was removed from the 17-year-old's abdomen in eastern India's Jharkhand state.
Sweety Kumari underwent the operation in Bokaro district on August 31.
A hairball weighing 15 lbs was retrieved from her abdomen after a six-hour-long operation.
Video footage shows a team of doctors operating on the girl and retrieving the massive entangled mass of hair from her abdomen.
According to local reports, a team of doctors led by Dr GN Sahu operated on the teenager at a private hospital in Bokaro.
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