Being Choked During Sex Can Cause Permanent Brain Damage, Alarming Study Finds

Chok­ing, also known as sex­u­al stran­gu­la­tion, has become an increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar sex­u­al prac­tice, par­tic­u­lar­ly among young peo­ple. How­ev­er, a new study has found that this risky behav­ior can lead to per­ma­nent brain dam­age, even when done just a few times.

The research, led by Dr. Deb­bie Herbinick, a sex­u­al and repro­duc­tive health researcher, showed that women who had been choked four times over the pre­vi­ous 30 days expe­ri­enced changes in their brain struc­tures that affect­ed their abil­i­ty to per­form work­ing mem­o­ry tasks.

Restrict­ed blood flow to the brain dur­ing chok­ing can cause it to stop oper­at­ing at nor­mal capac­i­ty imme­di­ate­ly and can lead to tis­sue death with­in as lit­tle as five min­utes due to a lack of oxy­gen and glu­cose supply.

Even brief peri­ods of chok­ing, such as 10 sec­onds, can cause some­one to pass out, and min­utes with­out oxy­gen can result in per­ma­nent brain damage.

The study, pub­lished in the jour­nal Brain Behav­ior, looked at two groups of 41 women – one that had been choked in the past 30 days and anoth­er that hadn’t. 

The chok­ing group exhib­it­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased cor­ti­cal thick­ness in mul­ti­ple brain regions involved in face recog­ni­tion, visu­al pro­cess­ing, and mem­o­ry, sug­gest­ing struc­tur­al changes to their brains.

“There’s big con­cern about teenagers and young peo­ple doing this, who don’t real­ly yet have full knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion about these behav­iors, who maybe have very lim­it­ed prac­tice or expe­ri­enc­ing or expe­ri­ence com­mu­ni­cat­ing about sex­u­al­i­ty,” said Dr. Herbernick.

The prac­tice of chok­ing dur­ing sex has become more main­stream, with ref­er­ences in pop­u­lar cul­ture, such as the HBO show Eupho­ria and the Fifty Shades of Grey fran­chise. How­ev­er, experts warn that this seem­ing­ly risky behav­ior can have dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences, even when done consensually.