The soy sauce caused the teen's blood to become saturated with salt

Jun 8, 2013 05:48 GMT  ·  By

A case report published in a recent issue of the Journal of Emergency Medicine details how a 19-year-old man ended up in a coma after drinking a quart of soy sauce.

Word has it that the teenager drank so much soy sauce on a dare, and that he started feeling ill not long after.

In just two hours after he had ingested the soy sauce, the 19-year-old had to be rushed to an emergency department in Virginia. At that time, he was comatose and had seizures.

“A 19-year-old man presented to the Emergency Department in a comatose state with seizure-like activity 2 hours after ingesting a quart of soy sauce,” reads the Abstract for the paper published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Dr. David J. Carlberg, who treated this teenager, explains that the soy sauce he ingested caused his blood to become oversaturated with salt.

This condition is known to the scientific community as hypernatremia, and most often occurs in people who are suffering with various psychiatric conditions whose symptoms include an irresistible craving for soy sauce.

However, it rarely happens that someone deliberately ingests enough soy sauce to make themselves terribly sick.

The Examiner explains that, once a person's blood is oversaturated with salt, water tends to move out of the tissues and into the bloodstream in order to equalize salt concentrations.

Some of this water comes from the brain, which can shrink and even start bleeding as a result of its no longer being properly hydrated.

The 19-year-old was given appropriate treatment and appears to have overcome this experience without suffering any neurological deficits.

Doctors say that, as far as they know, the amount of sodium they recorded in this man's blood is the highest ever documented in a person that managed to survive such an episode without suffering any brain damage.

As they put it, “Corrected for hyperglycemia, the patient's peak serum sodium was 196 mmol/L, which, to our knowledge, is the highest documented level in an adult patient to survive an acute sodium ingestion without neurologic deficits.”