A 51-year-old Japanese man had to be treated urgently after violent headaches following an orgasm. He had just suffered a ruptured aneurysm related to his sexual activity.
- A man had violent headaches at the time of orgasm while masturbating
- A man had violent headaches at the moment of orgasm while masturbating
- Hospitalized in emergency, he was treated for a ruptured aneurysm on the carotid
He was only looking for pleasure, he will almost go down in the annals of medicine. The facts go back several months: a 51-year-old Japanese man suffered a ruptured aneurysm when he had just reached orgasm while masturbating. A first, the only case to date observed of “masturbation-related arterial dissection”, according to the authors of the study that reports this case and which was published in November 2020 in the Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease.
This “exclusivity” seems disputed since, according to the Futura site, two other cases of aneurysm rupture – this is what this “arterial dissection” means, which results in an aneurysm associated with a hematoma that narrows an artery – , following masturbation have already been observed: two women aged 24 and 39 who died after this stroke. The Japanese patient will have been luckier. He was, according to his doctors, “out of danger” when he was released from the hospital where he had been placed a stent after the treatment of his aneurysm.
CT scan revealed brain hemorrhage
But his case had initially intrigued the doctors. The man, by his own admission accustomed to solitary pleasures, had in fact felt during orgasm a very violent pain in the left side of his head and had been seized with vomiting. Hospitalized in emergency, he had passed a scanner revealing a cerebral hemorrhage. But the angiography had not made it possible to define the origin of the bleeding and it was not until the end of the ninth day of hospitalization that he finally spotted on his left carotid a “dilatating lesion that turned into an aneurysm”. “It is not rare that the diagnosis of coronary artery disease is not established on the very acute phase because the angiographic signs of dissection can be apparent in the subacute or chronic phase as in our case”, underline the authors of the study.
Masturbation increases heart rate and blood pressure
They point out that, according to previous work, it is established that “masturbation induces transient increases in heart rate, blood pressure, and plasma norepinephrine levelsthese physiological changes induced by masturbation being considered to contribute to the development of an acute coronary syndrome“.
The Japanese patient’s aneurysm was eventually treated endovascularly and, as a precaution, doctors also placed a stent to ensure blood did not pool back into the aneurysm pocket.
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