Put this in the category of stupid college dares: a 19-year-old male was put into a coma from a soy sauce overdose, following a dare to drink more than a quart of the substance. The excessive salt in his body ultimately sent the teenager into a coma and then the hospital.

The soy sauce overdose case, published this week, details the treatment that emergency medical doctors used to save the young man's life.

This is the first known case of a deliberate overdose of salt, known technically as hypernatremia, surviving with no long-term effects. The condition is mostly seen in people with psychiatric issues who have a compulsion to eat as much salt as they can get their hands on.

Overdosing on salt disturbs the fine balance of salt in the body and can send people into a coma and cause seizures as was seen in this patient. The opposite syndrome, dysnatremia, occurs often in runners who sweat out much of the vital salts necessary for proper body function. Water leaves the vital organs, such as the brain, and enters the blood stream in an effort for the body to dilute the blood salt concentration. This process can cause the brain to shrink and blood vessels to break, adding up to a stroke.

When the 19-year-old patient was brought to the emergency room two hours after his quarter-gallon soy sauce overdose, ER staff jumped into immediate action. He was immediately given anti-seizure medication. When they put a rehydration tube into the patient's nose, brown liquid came streaming out. Doctors eventually pumped more than six liters of dextrose water into the patient within half an hour, flushing the body and diluting the concentration of salt.

The patient's blood salt levels returned to normal after five hours, but he remained in a coma for three more days as doctors waited to see if there would be long-term neurological effects. After waking up, the patient showed signs of some aftereffects in his brain, as seizures were indicated on brain scans in his hippocampus.

Fortunately, one month after the quick-thinking action of emergency room doctors, the young man was back at college with no lingering health or neurological effects from his soy sauce overdose.

In a cautious tale to "daring" college males everywhere, low-sodium soy sauce is the way to go.

Source: Carlberg D, Borek H, Syverud S, Holstege C. Survival of Acute Hypernatremia Due to Massive Soy Sauce Ingestion. The Journal of Emergency Medicine. 2013.