A 15-year old girl from Oklahoma has
reportedly died after taking an excessive amount of the anti-allergy medication Benadryl as part of a challenge on social media app TikTok.
The challenge involves TikTok users daring each other to take large amounts of the medication, which is usually taken to relieve allergy symptoms from conditions like hayfever. However when taken in excessive quantities, the drug also known as diphenhydramine can cause a wealth of unpleasant and dangerous side effects, some of which can be fatal.
“Benadryl in large doses can cause seizures and cardiac arrests. If young people are being encouraged to take it in large doses on TikTok, this is very dangerous,” said David Juurlink, MD, head of the division of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Toronto in Canada. “This is not a drug people should be experimenting with,” Juurlink added.
Juurlink says that people who overdose on the drug can experience a range of symptoms including sleepiness or coma, confusion, agitation, blurred vision, dry eyes and mouth, constipation and the inability to sweat and pass urine, describing it as the
“[expletive] buzz imaginable.”
Back in May, three teens from Texas were treated at Cook’s Children’s Hospital after also overdosing on the drug, one of them, a fourteen year old, reportedly taking
14 pills at once.
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