Osmotherapy is a medical treatment, using intravenous injection or oral administration

Oral administration

Oral administration is a route of administration where a substance is taken through the mouth.-Terminology:Per os is an adverbial phrase meaning literally from Latin "by mouth" or "by way of the mouth." The expression is used in medicine to describe a treatment that is taken orally. The...

 of an agent to induce dehydration

Dehydration

In physiology and medicine, dehydration is defined as the excessive loss of body fluid. It is literally the removal of water from an object; however, in physiological terms, it entails a deficiency of fluid within an organism...

. The goal of dehydration is to reduce the amount of accumulated fluid in the brain. The earliest description in medical literature

Medical literature

Medical literature refers to articles in journals and texts in books devoted to the field of medicine.Contemporary and historic views regarding diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of medical conditions have been documented for thousands of years. The Edwin Smith papyrus is the first known medical...

 dates back to 1919.

Treatment

Osmotherapy can be used to treat cerebral hemorrhage and cerebral edema

Cerebral edema

Cerebral edema or cerebral œdema is an excess accumulation of water in the intracellular or extracellular spaces of the brain.-Vasogenic:Due to a breakdown of tight endothelial junctions which make up the blood-brain barrier...

. This can include the use of mannitol

Mannitol

Mannitol is a white, crystalline organic compound with the formula . This polyol is used as an osmotic diuretic agent and a weak renal vasodilator...

 to maintain the brain's homeostasis

Homeostasis

Homeostasis is the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition of properties like temperature or pH...

.

External links

• A rather technical, but informative article