22 years of Constipated for!

Doctors in China have removed nearly 13kg of faecal matter from the intestine of a 22-year-old man, who was constipated since birth, reports said.

The unnamed man is believed to have been suffering from a rare congenital disease known as Hirschsprung. The condition, which is usually diagnosed in newborns, causes difficulty in passing bowel because of missing nerve cells in the colon. Chronic constipation leads to pile up of waste, creating what is known as a ‘megacolon’.

If not treated early, a person can develop sepsis - a potentially life-threatening complication in which toxins get mixed with the bloodstream. However, this man’s diagnosis was delayed until adulthood as his parents considered it a ‘small ailment’, the media reported.

Doctor Yin Lu of Tenth People’s Hospital in Shanghai, where the surgery was performed on June 8, told Chinese news site The Paper that the man’s colon had swollen so much that he looked as if he was more than nine months pregnant.

Reports added doctors removed a 30-inch long section of his colon filled with 13kg of faeces during the three-hour-long surgery. They said the man was taking laxatives, which provided only minor relief.