A 19-year-old man who drank a quart of soy sauce went into a coma and nearly died from an excess of salt in his body.
The young man, who drank the sauce after being dared by his friends, is the first person known to have deliberately overdosed on such a high amount of salt and actually survived, with no lasting brain problems, according to the doctors in Virginia who treated him.
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Too much salt in the blood is a condition called hypernatremia, and is usually seen in people with psychiatric conditions who develop a strong craving for salt, said Dr. David J. Carlberg, who treated the young man and works at Georgetown University Hospital.
"Hypernatremia is dangerous because it causes the brain to lose water. When there is too much salt in the bloodstream, water moves out of the body tissues and into the blood by the process of osmosis, to try to equalize the salt concentration between the two. As water the leaves the brain, the organ can shrink and bleed", Carlberg said.
After the man drank the sauce, he began twitching and having seizures. He was already in a coma when he was taken to the hospital where Carlberg was working, nearly four hours after the event.
"He didn't respond to any of the stimuli that we gave him," Carlberg said. "He had some clonus, which is just elevated reflexes. It's a sign that basically the nervous system wasn't working very well."
