A BRAVE nine-year-old girl had 11 inches of hair cut off to help her little brother.

Kylan-J Heslop, who is 20 months old, has an extremely rare condition known as Spinal Muscular Atrophy type one.

This means Kylan-J cannot move unaided and needs to be on non-invasive ventilation for many hours a day.

And now his big sister Layla has cut her hair off and raised over £2,000 to buy equipment for her brother.

She also donated her hair to the Little Princess Trust, which provides real-hair wigs for people who lose their own due to cancer treatment and other diseases.

Mum Amy Thomas, of Thornhill, said: "I'm so proud of her. It's amazing how much she raised. She realises how much money it is in the sense that she knows what we can buy for Kylan-J, she knows it's a lot but that we're not quite there yet."

Amy added that Layla had seen other people having their hair cut for charity and decided she wanted to do the same, despite her hair covering the full-length of her back.

"She loves her new haircut, she was a bit nervous at first but she said to me that there are worse things in life and she was thinking of children who didn't have hair," said Amy.

Kylan-J spent many weeks of his life as a baby at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, but thanks to community support and fundraising his dad Jackson and mum Amy were able to buy specialist equipment to care for him at home.

The family are now fundraising to buy a power wheelchair for the boy, which costs over £25,000.

Amy said: "He's doing really good at the moment. The power wheelchair will help him have more independence when he gets older. He'll never be able to walk but at least he'll be able to move around with that as he gets older. We'll keep fundraising until we get the amount we need."