A middle-aged Seattle man collapsed in his Portland, Ore.-area hotel room, where he was staying during a business trip.
He’d just tried fentanyl for the first time, and it very nearly killed him by literally destroying his brain.
Inhaling fentanyl caused terrible inflammation throughout large sections of white matter in the patient’s brain, his doctors at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) deduced.
White matter serves as the network of neural highways that connect various parts of the brain to each other and to the spinal cord.
As a result, he lost consciousness and came perilously close to irreversible loss of brain function — either killing him or leaving him a vegetable.
The patient is the first documented case of this phenomenon involving fentanyl, although previous cases have been noted involving heroin, researchers noted.
“This is a case of a middle-class man, in his late 40s, with kids, who used fentanyl for the first time,” said lead researcher Dr. Chris Eden , a second-year internal medicine resident at the OHSU School of Medicine. “It demonstrates that fentanyl can affect everyone in our society.”