Clay Ingestion: A Rare Cause of Hypokalemia

Excerpt

Hypokalemia induced by clay ingestion was reported in 1964 by Mengel and associates (1). They postulated that the potassium-trapping ability of some clays was responsible for the profound hypokalemia that their patient exhibited and drew a convincing parallel between their case and the old Cachexia Africana syndrome (2-3). If one considers the high incidence of clay ingestion in the Southeastern United States (4), it is surprising that few reports of clay-induced hypokalemia have been published. Due to the sparsity of reported cases, clay ingestion has not been recognized as a cause of hypokalemia in standard medical textbooks. We describe a