Doctors made shocking side effect discovery after man who’d smoked for decades complained about chronic cough
Dan Seddon
Featured Image Credit: American Journal of Case Reports
In a medical study conducted in Austria, doctors were stunned to find coarse black hairs growing in the back of a smoker's throat.
Hailing from the landlocked European country, the anonymous patient's 'primary symptoms' were noted down in the American Journal of Case Reports as 'respiratory distress attacks at night, snoring, hoarseness, and chronic coughing'.
The 52-year-old man had been smoking for 30 years in total, yet a historical accident from his youth was connected to the doctors' gruesome discovery too.
Having coughed up a hair, a team of Austrian medics decided to investigate by dangling a small camera down into his airways.
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There they encountered numerous dark, bacteria-coated hairs sprouting from his throat, which were then extracted.
Unfortunately, this newfound freedom was short-lived, as the hairs returned every year for the next 14 years, leading to a seriously rare diagnosis of 'endotracheal hair growth'.
In their AJCR writings, the authors claimed that smoking habits trigger throat inflammation, which in turn can rather disgustingly transform cells into hair follicles.
The poor man had between six and nine two-inch hairs curling out of his throat every time doctors had a nosey, with some even reaching his mouth.
In the end, he was only offered corrective treatment once he stopped puffing on cigarettes.
Doctors proceeded to perform 'endoscopic argon plasma coagulation' - AKA the burning of hair roots - on two occasions, after a pair of hairs came back.
Following the second procedure, none have returned to bother him.
As previously mentioned, the medics did allude to an incident in the patient's childhood as well, which saw him almost drown aged 10.
His trachea was sliced open to help him breathe, before a skin and cartilage graft from his ear was used to close it up again.
The endotracheal hair growth was discovered around this transplanted area, tellingly.
The researchers concluded that the hair growth was a potential complication of the surgery he'd had as a child, but prolonged smoking could have made it worse, stimulating the hair follicles and leaving him with the pretty grim health problem.
Meanwhile, it's been suggested by University College London's Dr Sarah Jackson that smoking reduces people's lives by around a decade.
Researchers at UCL found that on average a single cigarette takes about 20 minutes off a person’s life - meaning a typical pack of 20 cigarettes can shorten a person’s life by nearly seven hours.