Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome in a Hunger Striker Despite Oral Thiamine Supplementation

We present the case of a 49-year-old woman who underwent a 237-day hunger strike on the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Despite medical supervision and appropriate micronutrient supplementation, including higher-than-recommended dosing of oral thiamine, the patient developed Wernicke's Encephalopathy and subsequent Korsakoff Syndrome. She is now permanently impaired.

Hunger strikers are subject to numerous sequelae of micronutrient deficiency. Among these are the paired conditions of Wernicke's Encephalopathy and Korsakoff Syndrome, conditions secondary to prolonged thiamine deficiency. Unfortunately, few published guidelines exist regarding the medical management of hunger strikers. Preventative dosing guidance is borrowed from what is recommended for prolonged malnourishment from eating disorders or chronic alcohol use. Available guidelines are rarely academic. Rather, they were created by governmental agencies for the management of hunger strikers in prison or similar states of detention or incarceration. There is an indirect body of evidence that oral thiamine supplementation is rarely protective against the sequelae of thiamine deficiency in hunger strikers. We discuss supplementation recommendations and the evidence for their failure in practice. We briefly explore the historical evidence for the anatomic and physiologic changes of prolonged starvation that potentially explain this treatment failure, and offer alternatives to standard supplementation.

The current recommendations of the management of hunger strikers regarding the prevention of thiamine deficiency are inadequate, and rarely prevent the clinical sequelae. Alternate management strategies need to be both researched and empirically used, while that research is being carried out. Novel lipid-soluble thiamine derivatives have promise, but prophylactic intravenous/intramuscular thiamine should be explored as the current standard of care.