Oral rehydration therapy
type of fluid replacement used to prevent and treat dehydration
Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) is a type of fluid replacement used to prevent and treat dehydration, especially due to diarrhea. It involves drinking water with modest amounts of sugar and salts, specifically sodium and potassium. Oral rehydration therapy can also be given by a nasogastric tube. Therapy can include the use of zinc supplements to reduce the duration of diarrhea in infants and children under the age of 5. Use of oral rehydration therapy has been estimated to decrease the risk of death from diarrhea by up to 93%.
Earliest known medication was done by Hemendra Nath Chatterjee in 1953 and he published it in The Lancet the results of using ORS to treat people with mild cholera.
Side effects may include vomiting, high blood sodium, or high blood potassium. If vomiting occurs, it is recommended that use be paused for 10 minutes and then gradually restarted. The recommended formulation includes sodium chloride, sodium citrate, potassium chloride, and glucose. Glucose may be replaced by sucrose and sodium citrate may be replaced by sodium bicarbonate, if not available, although the resulting mixture is not shelf stable in high-humidity environments.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1381652. The Library of Congress control number is sh88002408. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1953.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oral rehydration therapy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.