each week we comb through science journals to explore a baffling medical issue.
with all due respect to cancer and heart disease, there may be no greater threat to the health of young men then the unfailing urge to blindly accept dumb dares from so-called friends.
such was the case for a 19-year-old man from virginia who earned an unenviable spot in
the journal of emergency medicine
in 2013 by becoming the first known human to overdose on soy sauce and suffer no permanent neurological damage. yes, soy sauce.
not long after consuming a quart of the salty substance, the man began to twitch and suffer seizures, forcing those very same friends to rush him to the hospital,
according to live science
. by the time he made it to the emergency room, he was foaming at the mouth and had slipped into a coma.
“he didn’t respond to any of the stimuli that we gave him,” said david j. carlberg, the emergency room doctor at medstar georgetown university hospital in washington, d.c. who treated the teenager. “he had some clonus, which is just elevated reflexes. it’s a sign that basically the nervous system wasn’t working very well.”
the bottle of soy sauce the patient poured down his throat contained in the neighbourhood of 56,000 milligrams of sodium, almost 40 times the daily intake
recommended by health canada
. the surge of salt in his bloodstream
resulted in hypernatremia
, a condition usually only observed in mentally ill patients with a penchant for salt. hypernatremia arises when a person loses too much water or takes on too much sodium for the body to regulate. in an attempt to dilute the deluge, the body pulls water from surrounding tissues.