Headaches, nausea and stomach pains are the symptoms why a 16-year old girl from Britain went to see a doctor. At the beginning doctors said to her that the symptoms were caused by urinary tract infection and they prescribed her antibiotics. But her symptoms were still present even after two doses of antibiotics, so she went to see her doctor again when she was diagnosed with jaundice.
After eliminating hepatitis since she hadn’t been exposed at any risks, doctors continued their survey to find out what was the reason for her condition. What they found out was unexpected she had been consuming Chinese green tea in order to lose weight. She said that she bought it online and drank 3 cups of it per day in a period of several months. The problem was that all the instruction for its consumption were in Chinese and she didn’t know how she should do that.
After these finding she was given the right therapy and the doctors asked her parents to bring the tea package for further examinations. They revealed that the tea contained an ingredient called ”camellia sinensis” which was known to cause hepatitis in teenage girls. She got out of the hospital after few days, but it took months for her liver to recover entirely.
From this case has been revealed that drinking green tea can cause some liver diseases and since then doctors recommended to their patients to drink green tea only in small amounts. However this particular tea that the girl drank had also some other disadvantages since it included pesticides and other ingredient.
Since many of you don’t know what is hepatitis we decided to inform you more about this disease.
Hepatitis is inflammation of the liver and it occurs as a result of some viral infections or some other harmful substances like alcohol. This can occur either with few symptom or no symptoms. It often leads to jaundice, a yellow discoloration of the skin, mucous membrane, and conjunctiva, along with poor appetite and sickness. Some types of hepatitis will pass without causing permanent damage to the liver. This is normally acute hepatitis, which can heal on its own.
Unluckily some other types of hepatitis can persist in the liver for many years and can cause scarring of the liver (cirrhosis). In the worst cases it can lead to total dysfunction of the liver and have a fatal ending. These types of long-lasting hepatitis are known as chronic hepatitis.
Some of the symptoms of hepatitis are associated with the one of flu and they are:
- feeling sick
- being sick
- muscle and joint pain
- occasionally, yellowing of the eyes and skin (jaundice)
- a high temperature (fever) of 38ºC (100.4ºF) or above
- headache
Unluckily in most of the cases hepatitis has no symptoms so most of the people have no idea that they are affected by this terrible disease.
