A teenage boy has died from a stroke that is understood to have been caused by a love bite from his girlfriend.
Julio Macias Gonzalez, 17, had convulsions while eating dinner with his family in Mexico City, after spending the evening with his 24-year-old girlfriend, local media reported.
Emergency services were called, but the boy died at the scene.
According to Mexican media reports, doctors believe the suction of the love bite resulted in a blood clot, which travelled to Mr Gonzalez’s brain and caused the stroke.
The boy’s parents blamed his girlfriend for the death, and she is thought to be in hiding.
The family, from the Iztapalapa borough, told local media they had disapproved of the seven year age difference between their son and his girlfriend, but he had refused to break up with her.
This is the second reported case of a love bite causing a stroke.
In 2011, a 44-year-old woman from New Zealand experienced loss of movement in her left arm and was taken to hospital.
According to media reports from the time doctors suspected she had had a stroke but couldn’t work out why, until they noticed a bruise on the right side of her neck, left by a love bite.
They concluded the suction from the love bite had damaged a major artery and formed a blood clot, which travelled to her heart and caused a minor stroke.
She noticed the symptoms later, while sitting watching television.
Dr Teddy Wu, who treated the woman at Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, reported the case in a medical journal.
“To my knowledge, it's the first time someone has been hospitalised by a hickey," he said at the time, using the American term for a love bite.
The woman was treated with warfarin, an anti-coagulant, and the clot disappeared almost entirely within a week, leading to a full recovery.
Dr Wu told local media that if the woman had not been treated quickly she could have suffered further strokes.
'Strokes have different levels of severity,' he said, 'but possibly patients can become paralysed.'
