The most inseparable thing for human beings may be water. So, today’s news, to some extent, made us a little scared.
“Water can be poisonous too!”
Image source: Weibo@Header News
Can you be poisoned by drinking too much water? Do colonoscopy bowel preparations cause water intoxication? How much water is too much to drink? These water-related questions will be discussed today.
Drinking too much water can indeed be poisonous
First of all, this news should be true, nor is the doctor misjudging the cause, or “water poisoning” after drinking a lot of water.
In reality, there are even more serious cases.
In 2007, a 28-year-old California woman competed in a live water drinking contest to win a Wii. After drinking about 6 liters of water in three hours, Jennifer Strange vomited on the spot, suffered a splitting headache and eventually died.
Simply put, human blood needs to maintain a certain ion concentration (mainly sodium), and drinking water usually affects the concentration, but it can quickly reach a steady state through urination and other methods.
If the ion concentration drops rapidly, the concentration inside and outside the cell creates an osmotic pressure difference, and a large amount of water enters the cell. The most fragile brain cells become swollen after being “saturated with water”, compressing various important centers, headache, drowsiness, confusion of consciousness, epilepsy, coma, and respiratory arrest, and life comes to an end.
The brain is ‘swollen’
Image credit: Shutterstock.com
The essence of water intoxication is hyponatremia.
Yes, human beings need water, and even more water in the right amount. “Neither salty nor bland” is healthy.
Whether it will be poisoned can not only depend on the amount of water you drink
How much water is too much to drink? The protagonist of the news needs 3 liters of water for 2 hours, which seems a lot, but usually do you need to drink so much for colonoscopy? Water poisoning too?
Drinking water regularly to avoid water intoxication doesn’t make much sense. Because in addition to drinking, we also have the ability to drain water.
The main source of drainage is the kidneys. Healthy kidneys can usually excrete 800 to 1000 ml per hour, so we can drink up to 800 to 1000 ml per hour without affecting the steady state of blood ion concentration.
In special moments, there are other ways to drain water, such as increased sweating after exercise, and you can drink more water. You need to drink a lot of water for bowel prep (those meds are awful, by the way), but at the same time you’ll be “guzzling a thousand miles” and you’ll be able to drink more as the water is pulled out.
So there is no simple answer to “how much water can I drink as fast as I can”.
Listen to the body, water intoxication is hard to come by
What we need to know more is that “water poisoning” is difficult to occur, and it has nothing to do with how much water you drink…
Water intoxication is essentially hyponatremia, which can be caused by too much water, more often because the kidneys’ ability to drain water is reduced, the body’s ability to store sodium is reduced, or Too little sodium…
So most water intoxication can find the basis of kidney disease, endocrine disease or severe malnutrition.
If you don’t have these basic problems, then listen to your body. If you drink too much too fast, your body will remind you of fatigue and nausea first, and you won’t be killed by brain edema all of a sudden. . As long as you feel it, you can stop in time. For a Wii not to…
Sometimes, special attention should be paid to the fact that the water lost by a lot of sweating also contains more sodium and potassium electrolytes. At this time, you should not drink plain water, but to drink salty sodium and potassium electrolytes. The smell of water can greatly reduce the occurrence of water poisoning.
Drinking until you are not thirsty is the most appropriate amount of water to drink.
Image credit: Giphy
The latest and hottest medical topics, today’s hot discussion for you to interpret
Planning
Planning: Eric | Producer: Feidi
Cover image source: Dr. Lilac Design Team