He had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 30 years, a habit which gave him some unpleasant surprises. For him, the complications began in 2007. Following inconveniences, the patient first consulted doctors, complaining in particular of having a hoarse voice, breathing difficulties and a chronic cough. He told them he started smoking in 1990, at the age of 20, and said he had once spit out a hair.
Based on his symptoms, doctors performed a procedure that allowed them to guide a small camera into his airway and ultimately discovered several hairs growing in an area of his throat that he had previously had surgery on.
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Six to nine five-centimeter hairs
Originally from Austria, the man was diagnosed with endotracheal hair growth. It is an extremely rare condition, with only a handful of cases recorded in the medical literature. In his throat were six to nine five-centimeter hairs, some of which had managed to pass through the larynx and grow into his mouth. And if the causes are still not clear today, doctors nevertheless affirmed that, in this case, the hair growth was triggered by smoking.
Concretely, according to doctors, whose comments were relayed in the American Journal of Case Reports, smoking causes inflammation of the tissues of the throat, which would lead to the transformation of stem cells into hair follicles or into a group of cells and structures allowing hair growth.
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Despite his chronic illness, they did not want to proceed with the curative procedure until he had stopped smoking, which he did in 2020. The hair regrowth was ultimately stopped after doctors performed endoscopic argon plasma coagulation (burning of the root from which hair grows). A year after this procedure, two throat hairs were removed and another coagulation was performed. Since then, no hair has grown back.
