Adults and children should be aware about the dangers of highly caffeinated beverages:
Between 2007 and 2011, the number of ER visits more than doubled from roughly 10,000 to almost 21,000. In 2011, 58 percent of these ER visits involved energy drinks alone, while 42 percent also included drug or alcohol use.
Most of these cases involved teens or young adults, although there was an alarming spike in the number of people aged 40 and older showing up in the ER after consuming these drinks, according to the report from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Symptoms ranged from insomnia, nervousness, headaches and fast heartbeats to seizures.
So more than 12,000 Americans ended up in an emergency room in 2011 as a result of ingesting a perfectly legal and widely available beverage (with nothing else ingested). How many other legal products are out there inflicting the same degree of harm, requiring emergency care? Surely guns and alcohol take the cake (and both are laughably “regulated”). Any others?
Read article from HealthDay.com here.