From Thursday’s edition of The Straits Times, it’s reported that researchers in Singapore have confirmed that taking the illegal sex-enhancement drug Power 1 Walnut can cause severe brain damage, after studying the brains of eight men who took it.Scientists from the National Neuroscience Institute (NNI) used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to find lesions and plaque build-up in parts of the eight men’s brains that control short-term memory and the part that links the right brain to the left.
The damages were caused by severe low blood sugar, a result of the illegal drug that had been contaminated by glibenclamide, which is used to treat high sugar in diabetic patients, the paper said. Severe low blood sugar can lead to coma and death, if left untreated.
Of the eight patients in the study, seven were found to have damages in the forebrain that controls short-term memory and spatial navigation and three had unusual damage in one side of the brain.
The findings is published in this month’s Radiology, a peer review journal and represents one of the largest series of hypoglycaemic brain damage in the world. Hypoglycaemic brain damage or brain damage resulting from severely low blood sugar is a rare condition.
Power 1 Walnut and other similar illegal sex enhancement pills have already killed 10 men in Singapore, aged between 35 and 84, in the past seven months.They were comatose when they died from complications such as infections and major organ failure.