Hear
A young Spanish man ended up on the operating table after contracting an infection caused by biting his nails. Identified only by his first name, Mario told about what happened in the program ‘Espejo Público’ and detailed how he had the mania, which affects between 20% and 30% of the world’s populationaccording to data from the scientific journal National Library of Medicine, affected his health.
Mario had been out with friends when he was taken to the hospital due to severe stomach pain.
The doctors informed the Spaniard that I suffered from angina (chest pain that occurs due to reduced blood flow to the heart) and began treatment to control the condition. However, he continued to complain of pain and became paralyzed in both legs, so he had to return to the hospital.
On this second visit, doctors discovered that there was actually a bacteria entering his body due to his nail-biting habit, also called onychophagia.
According to Mario, “the doctors informed me that The bacteria had fixed on the mitral valve of the heart, which caused embolisms in the kidneys, brain and spleen.” The parasite ended up growing inside the young man’s heart, leading to the need for open heart surgery.
Despite the traumatic experience, Mario admitted that he “continues to bite his nails.”
“It’s a mistake that many make,” he said about the difficulty of changing old habits.
Onychophagia is the situation in which some people bite their nails, preferably the fingers. According to the Health Education group of the Spanish Society of Internal Medicine (SEMI), this condition can be a mania or have an emotional and behavioral cause, which sometimes requires professional help to correct.
Doing so can leave the skin exposed and cause periungual structural deterioration. It is more common in children, since 30 percent of them present it between the ages of seven and ten, and it can reach 45 percent of adolescents.
Children of parents who suffer from some type of mental disorder are more likely to suffer from it. Sometimes they not only bite their nails, but also the cuticle of the neighboring skin, what we call hangnails.
Onychophagia often causes other disorders or compulsive behaviors, such as trichotillomania (hair pulling and eating) and mucomania (eating secretions or mucus).
O Globe/GDA
