A 7-year-old girl had three weeks of on-and-off upper belly pain, felt full after eating very little, and had lost 4.5 kilograms, nearly 10 pounds. An MRI and a specialized X-ray study both pointed her doctors toward a rare condition in which part of the small intestine is squeezed near a major artery. The real culprit was a hairball nearly 4 inches long.
The case, published Feb. 26 in Frontiers in Pediatrics by physicians at The Valley Hospital and Valley Medical Group in Paramus, New Jersey, shows how a gastric trichobezoar, a mass of swallowed hair in the stomach, closely mimicked superior mesenteric artery (SMA) syndrome across multiple imaging tests.
