“Actually, when we were looking at the literature we found a couple of cases similar to our case,” said Gunasekaran. It’s not the first time chilli peppers have triggered serious repercussions. Instead, they say, it is likely the Carolina Reaper was to blame. While such narrowing of the blood vessels can be triggered by certain medications or drugs, the team found nothing of the sort when they screened the man’s urine. In rare cases, said Gunasekaran, RCVS can cause a stroke.

The diagnosis was backed up by a scan five weeks later showing the arteries had returned to normal. A number of arteries in the brain had narrowed, and as a result the team decided it was a condition known as reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome (RCVS), which probably caused the thunderclap headache. What’s more, the man did not report having any speech or vision problems.īut when the medical team tried another type of CT scan designed to look at the blood vessels in the brain, they had a surprise. But it keeps coming back,” said Dr Kulothungan Gunasekaran of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, a co-author of the report, adding that thunderclap headaches can be caused by a number of problems including bleeding inside the brain or blood clots.ĬT and MRI scans of the man’s brain were taken but showed nothing out of the ordinary. “ lasts for a few minutes and it might be associated with dry-heaving, nausea, vomiting – and then it gets better on its own. The details, published in the journal BMJ Case Reports, reveal the pain was so terrible the man went to the emergency room at Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, a village in New York State. The Carolina Reaper, which can top 2.2m on the Scoville heat scale, was the world’s hottest pepper at the time of the incident in 2016 – although new breeds called Pepper X and Dragon’s Breath have since reportedly surpassed it.

Carolina reaper scoville