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Doctors who treated her at Broomfield Hospital, Chelmsford, Essex, where she was taken after lapsing into a coma at home during her 18th birthday party, will tell the coroner that "water intoxication", and not an allergic reaction to the drug, was the cause of death. The inquest into her death is to open in Chelmsford today but is expected to be adjourned. The coroner will receive a post-mortem report by the Home Office pathologist Dr Paula Lammis.
Water intoxication occurs when a person drinks so much water - a minimum of three litres - that the blood becomes diluted. Laboratory results show that on admission to hospital hours after taking the 10 pounds tablet, Leah's plasma sodium level - a measure of how dilute her blood had become - had fallen to 126 millimoles per litre compared with a normal range of 134 to 145.
As a result, water was sucked into her brain cells under osmotic pressure, causing them to swell. This increased pressure on the brain stem, resulting in coma and death.
Overheating and dehydration are known risks of taking Ecstasy, a stimulant which can keep young people dancing for hours, and drug agencies advise users to drink plenty of water and take frequent rests.
Although she had not been dancing energetically for hours, it is understood that when Leah began to feel unwell at the party she made repeated trips to the bathroom to drink water. She believed mistakenly that this was the way to ward off the ill-effects of the drug.
Leah's case attracted national attention after her parents tried to alert young people to the dangers of drug-taking, releasing a photograph of her in intensive care. At Prime Minister's Question Time yesterday, John Major expressed sympathy for the girl's parents.
Experts said yesterday that a single pill of the drug could not have poisoned her and was highly unlikely to have caused an allergic reaction. Analysis of blood samples has also shown that the pill was not contaminated, as earlier speculation had suggested. Friends who took the same pills were unaffected.
