Health officials across the country are warning teens – and their parents – of the potentially fatal consequences of partaking in the social media trend called the “Benadryl Challenge” after an Oklahoma 15-year-old girl died from overdosing on the common allergy medication.
The “challenge” dares teens to take a large dose of the over-the-counter antihistamine diphenhydramine, sold under the brand name Benadryl, supposedly to get high, recording a video of oneself hallucinating and posting it to the social media app TikTok.
"The dose that can cause a hallucination is very close to the dose that can cause something potentially life-threatening," Scott Schaeffer, director of the Oklahoma Center for Poison and Drug Information, told Oklahoma City’s NBC network affiliate KFOR.
"Large doses of Benadryl can cause seizures and, particularly, problems with the heart. The heart tends to go out of rhythm and not pump blood effectively."
Schaeffer’s comments came after Chloe Phillips of Blanchard, Oklahoma, died Aug. 21, numerous outlets have reported.
The girl’s death followed reports of three teens in Fort Worth, Texas, who ended up hospitalized in May after taking large doses of the drug.
One of them, a 14-year-old girl, was admitted to the hospital with a heart rate of 199, more than triple a normal pulse of 60 for her age group. She also was hallucinating and speaking in fractured sentences, Newsweek reported.
All three recovered, but each said they had taken the medication as part of the dare.
Reports of Phillips’ death has prompted her family to plea for the ending of the phenomenon, the New York Post reported, and also sparked alerts from health officials from Toronto to Arizona to warn of the dangers.
TikTok said it was alerted to the trend in May and is monitoring for it.
“We first learned of this 'challenge' in May and quickly removed the very small amount of content that we found,” it said in a statement to Forbes. “We've been keeping an eye on this topic since and removing any new content – which again has been in extremely small numbers – to prevent any spread on our platform.”
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