Marathon Runner Dies: Drank Too Much Gatorade
June 4, 2007
The 28-year-old runner who collapsed and died in this year’s Boston Marathon was felled by a precipitous cascade of medical events brought on in part by drinking too much fluid, the state medical examiner’s office concluded yesterday….
On that April Monday, friends tracked her progress. They said that Lucero, wearing bib number 15,611, drank large amounts of Gatorade and looked well as she loped through the bottom of Heartbreak Hill in Newton, about six miles from the finish.
The precise causes of the syndrome that killed Lucero remain somewhat mysterious, and dispute persists among researchers over whether the predominant triggering mechanism is related to too much fluid or extreme dehydration. Increasingly, though, scientists believe that the problem transcends a simple equation of too much or too little water. They believe it’s vastly more complex. Siegel and other researchers theorize that marathoners, triathletes, and other athletes who engage in extreme sporting competition often deplete the fuel that powers the body’s cells. When this happens, a hormone called arginine vasopressin gets released. Part of its function is to tell the kidneys to hold on to fluids. That, in turn, precipitates an imbalance in sodium levels in the blood. But as salt drops in the blood, it does not do so in cells. The body, in its constant pursuit of equilibrium, attempts to force salt out of cells by flooding them. That causes swelling. Muscles can endure such swelling because they can bulge outward. The brain, though, cannot………Read More..
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