Nearly all medical journal articles about pica call the condition “underreported” and “unrecognized.” Perhaps it is because patients fear the quizzical look and follow-up question: “You’re eating what?”Īccording to some studies, more than 50 percent of kids age 18 to 36 months seek and ingest non-food items. It is difficult to say how common pica is, since most people don’t report it. Many people, for reasons that are not entirely clear to scientists, eat these nonnutritive substances.Ī recent study by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that hospitalizations for pica in a 10-year span jumped 93 percent, from 964 in 1999-2000 to 1,862 in 2008-2009. Human magpies, according to the medical literature, have been known to eat paper, and a lot more besides: dirt, ashes, starch, matches, cardboard, hair, laundry detergent, chalk and soap, among other things. This is the Latin word for magpie, a bird with a reputation for eating practically anything. The compulsion to eat what’s inedible is known in the medical world as pica (pronounced “PIE-ka”). And should he be worried? Could this habit cause harm? It had started, the father recalled, with loose papers, and progressed to whole books. Her parents were trying to get her to stop, but she simply wouldn’t.
The 6-year-old girl was otherwise normal: She was developing and growing appropriately she had not complained of any pain the rest of her diet was regular.
“She eats them,” he explained, describing how she tore away the pages, one by one, and put them in her mouth, munching and chewing on them. The girl, he said, had become a voracious consumer of books. The father who came to our family-medicine clinic with his young daughter seemed concerned.
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