A 19-year-old man drank a quart of soy sauce on a dare, nearly dying as a result.  According to Discovery News, this incident marked the first known case of a deliberate salt overdose where the individual survived without permanent neurological effects.

Doctors reported the case in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, identifying how he was treated and what the results were.  After the man drank the soy sauce, he began having seizures and he was taken to the emergency room.  By the time he got there, it had been two hours since he ingested the overdose of sodium and he was in a coma.  The doctors administered six liters of free water over a period of 30 minutes.

After about five hours, the sodium levels returned to normal.  Three days later, the man woke up from the coma on his own.  For only one month following the incident, his brain showed residual effects in the hippocampus.  The doctors on his case concluded that he has made it through the overdose without neurologic deficits.  The treatment of his case is recommended for other, similar cases.

Hypernatremia, the medical term for a sodium overdose, is an imbalance of water to salt in the body.  It is a common electrolyte problem that Medscape describes as an issue of total water in the body.  The incidence of hospitalization for hypernatremia is low, with estimates for the U.S. ranging from less than one percent to 5.5 percent.  The majority of cases of hypernatremia occur while patients are in the hospital.

Salt overdoses can also occur without deliberate consumption.  In the U.K., recent research identified that sweet biscuits actually contain enough salt that regular consumption by children can result in toxic levels of sodium in the body.  These products contained more sodium than common salt-heavy culprits such as popcorn.  The survey of products found the high levels of salt to be a popular characteristic of over 100 varieties of cookies.

High levels of sodium may not always be bad, however.  Australian researchers studying an anti-malaria drug have found a need for salt overdoses.  The drug they are developing uses a salt overdose to target the malaria parasite carried by the body.  The parasite allows sodium in and high levels in the body will cause a build-up in the malaria parasite and kill it off.  While this offers promise for ending malaria, caution will need to be exercised to ensure that the sodium-based attacks are not taken too far.