Well, this is hair-raising.
The serious risks of smoking tobacco are well-established — they include cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes and accelerated aging of the skin.
But here’s a new and decidedly ewww one. A seasoned pack-a-day Austrian smoker began growing hair inside his throat as a rare complication of his cigarette addiction. His case was detailed last week in the American Journal of Case Reports.
The unidentified 52-year-old man visited doctors in 2007, about 17 years after he started smoking. He was experiencing a hoarse voice, difficulty breathing and a chronic cough.
A bronchoscopy revealed inflammation and several hairs in the man’s throat in an area that had previously been operated on. The man was diagnosed with endotracheal hair growth, or hair growing in the throat.
At age 10, the man had nearly drowned and was treated with a tracheotomy to stabilize his breathing.
The wound was subsequently closed using skin and cartilage from his ear. Later, when he sought treatment for his cough and shortness of breath, hair growth was detected around the site of this graft.
Doctors were able to remove the hairs by plucking them out, a procedure that provided relief but not a permanent solution.
The hairs continued to regrow, and the patient returned to the hospital annually for 14 years, complaining of the same symptoms.
Typically, there were six to nine 2-inch hairs in the man’s throat, with some passing through his voice box and growing into his mouth. In addition to removal, the man was treated with antibiotics, as the hairs were covered in bacteria.
The hairy situation was only remedied in 2022 when the man stopped smoking and doctors were able to perform an endoscopic argon plasma coagulation — burning the root from which the hair was growing.
A second coagulation, the following year, eliminated the reoccurrence of the hairs altogether.
While smoking is fairly common — about 28.3 million or one in nine Americans hold hard to the habit — endotracheal hair growth is extremely rare.
In their report, doctors noted it was only the second case of its kind they had seen.
Owing to that rarity, the exact cause for the hairy situation is up for debate.
In this instance, the treatment team believes the condition was triggered by the man’s smoking. Smoking incites inflammation of the throat tissue, which can cause stem cells to turn into hair follicles, thereby enabling hair growth.
“These findings may support our hypothesis that the smoking habits in the presented case may have induced and stimulated endotracheal hair growth,” the doctors wrote. “Of course, this assumption cannot be proven due to the rarity of such cases.”
