He had arrived in the hospital for the complications of an urinary tract obstruction, but once examined by the doctors a completely different problem emerged: a mysterious gray pigmentation of the skin, eyes and nails. A phenomenon known as clay, which is usually caused by prolonged exposure to silver. As a rule, it is a professional danger of craftsmen and miners who find themselves working for decades with the precious metal. In the case of man, an 84 -year -old from Hong Kong, however, there were no plausible explanations for the ingestion of similar quantities of silver: a small medical mystery, therefore, described in a case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
What is clay
From the anamnesis carried out by the doctors, it emerged that the unusual color of the skin was not a particularly recent phenomenon: the patient had noticed at least five years, but had not considered the problem worthy of attention. The analyzes carried out highlighted the presence of silver in its body in concentrations 40 times higher than the norm. A circumstance that had determined the formation of small silver granules, which have deposited in the tissues of the skin, in the sweat glands, in the blood vessels and in the sclera (the white part of the eye) of the man, giving him the silver gray tint that He attracted the attention of the doctors.
The doctors therefore attempted to find the source of the metal accumulated in the organism of the elderly, but without success. In the past, clay was common between craftsmen and miners who work with this metal, but this was not the case since the patient had worked all his life as a waiter. Then there are medicines that contain silver (usually in the form of colloidal silver), but the man said he had never made use of it.
Without explanations
The only health problem he suffered from was a prostate tumor in benign form. And the only drug it was taking was the finely used Finasteride to prevent hair loss, and completely without silver inside. In the article, the doctors admit that they have not found any plausible explanation for the entry of all that amount of silver into the patient’s body.
The good news is that it should not have negative effects for its health, given that even the maximum possible concentrations the presence of silver in the body can, at most, interfere with the action of some drugs, such as antibiotics and thyroxine (a hormone used in hypothyroidism therapy). The bad one is that the patient can only get used to his own color, because even if you want there is very little that doctors can do to eliminate it.