Doctors say a University of Virginia student who drank a quart of soy sauce on a dare is the first person known to have deliberately overdosed on salt and lived with no lasting brain damage.
John Paul Boldrick was 19 when he drank the soy sauce as part of an initiation to join the Zeta Psi fraternity house in February 2011. He ended up in a coma but survived with no lasting neurological problems, according to LiveScience.
A new case report in the Journal of Emergency Medicine details how Boldrick, after consuming such a high amount of salt, survived hypernatremia, a condition that arises when there is too much salt in the blood.
Hypernatremia causes the brain to lose water, according to LiveScience. When there’s too much salt in the blood, the body tries to equalize the salt concentration and water moves out of body tissue and into blood. The brain shrinks as a result.
When Boldrick drank the soy sauce, he began seizing and foaming at the mouth, according to the case report. Brothers at Zeta Psi brought him to an emergency room and he was given anti-seizing medication.
Boldrick was already in a coma when he was taken to the University of Virginia Medical Center.
‘He didn’t respond to any of the stimuli that we gave him,’ Dr David J Carlberg, who was working at the center when Boldrick was brought in four hours after consuming the soy sauce, told LiveScience. ‘He had some clonus, which is just elevated reflexes. It’s a sign that basically the nervous system wasn’t working very well.’
LiveScience reports the hospital flushed out the salt in Boldrick’s system using sugar water dextrose administered through a nasal tube. Within a half hour, 6 liters of sugar water were pumped into Boldrick’s body. After five hours, his sodium levels returned to normal.
Boldrick was in a coma for three days, but woke up on his own.
After a month, doctors said Boldrick seemed fine—back at school and doing well on his exams.
Dr Carlberg told LiveScience he believes the young man survived without brain injury because the hospital was able to reduce his sodium levels so quickly.
‘We were more aggressive than had been reported before in terms of bringing his sodium back down to a safer range,’ said Carlberg.
Most people with hypernatremia have psychiatric conditions as well, Dr Carlberg told LiveScience. Usually, such sodium overdose happens gradually. LiveScience reports that doctors in the 60s and 70s used to accidentally cause hypernatremia when they gave salt to poisoned patients, causing them to vomit.
The case report also notes salt overdose was a common method for suicide in ancient China.
via DailyMail
