Doctors today told how a young woman who kept fainting while eating sandwiches was cured with a heart pacemaker.
The woman fainted when she ate sandwiches or drank fizzy drinks, she told doctors.
Eventually she collapsed while eating a sandwich while queuing in traffic.
The woman weighed seven stone – 46.5 kg – but doctors in Birmingham, UK, concluded she was not suffering from anorexia.
Writing in The Lancet, they say she suffered from a condition called swallow syncope – when swallowing triggers a reaction in the nervous system that causes the heart to stop briefly.
Cardiologists Dr Christopher Boos and Dr Howard Marshall, of University Hospital Birmingham, write: "Cardiac pacing, when necessary, has been shown to be effective in an increasing number of case reports…
"Patients with swallow syncope can languish for years because the diagnosis is little known — although a case report on it was published in The Lancet, 50 years ago."
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