How do doctors treat severe over-hydration (like the famous water drinking contest)?
In: Biology
The other part of that contest was To Not Pee.
The last contest to hold their pee the longest won the Wii video game.
If that lady, or any healthy person drank a bunch of water and urinated as needed, they’d be fine. Since she intentionally didn’t void excess water, it diluted her electrolytes, sodium most importantly.
“Overhydration” dilutes the amount of sodium in the blood, what is called hyponatremia. Sodium is carefully given back, generally with intravenous fluids.
EDIT: For completion, water can also be removed with medications to increase urination. Sometimes the patient is allowed to correct slowly.
“Quick, do is I say!”
“But doctor, I’m so full from the water drinking contest.”
“Eat this cube of salt , patient!”
That’s how I imagine it would go down.
Limited fluid intake, diuretics (drugs that make you pee more) in combination with intravenous fluid to manage electrolyte balance (to prevent the many many many things that extreme electrolyte imbalance can cause).
You know how the silica gel packets say do not eat?
If they were to replace water with gatorade, would they survive?
If the person has healthy kidneys, they’d give lots and lots of additional fluid with sodium in it (or perhaps a more “complete” solution like lactated ringer’s solution.) If it was severe enough and they wanted to treat it aggressively, they’d give a hypertonic saline solution that has more sodium than the blood normally does to balance it out, but you have to be careful to monitor that because you can overshoot the target. In MOST cases they’ll use normal saline (or again, something close to it) to bring the sodium level back down.
I just realized this is ELI5 and not nostupidquestions, but I’m going to leave the answer and let it get taken down.
Excessive hydrations dilutes your electrolytes so what they would do is draw blood and infuse the electrolytes you need. The big ones are sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium. Potassium and sodium are the ones most likely to be at a life threatening low because they follow water through your kidneys into your urine. So when you drink a ton of water, you’re pissing like a racehorse so you’re taking in water with no electrolytes and peeing out liquid that does.
Medications like Furosemide are given to make you urinate excess fluid
3% normal saline to replace salt loss
Other electrolyte replenishment as needed
Story time! There once was a young private in the army. On his first deployment overseas, this young private had a sergeant who threatened to kill anyone who got a heat injury. This young private was a bit scared of this somewhat unhinged sergeant and went full bore on his water. Being young and stupid, this young private didn’t know you could *over* hydrate. This young private drank so much water that he flushed electrolytes out of his system (from what he understood). This young private started feeling like absolute camel shit, and a medic came by to fix him up. After telling the medic what happened, said medic left and came back with an MRE. The medic handed the MRE to the young private and said, “Eat all of this.” Listening to the medic, the young private took a bite of what tasted like chicken noodle soup flavored salt. Absolutely disgusting. Medic laughed. Sergeant laughed. Young private hates salt to this day.
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