A woman from California has died after taking part in a radio competition to drink as much water as she could without going to the toilet.

Jennifer Lea Strange, 28, was found dead in her Sacramento home by her mother at 2pm on Friday after taking part in "Hold Your Wee for a Wii", a competition to win the new Nintendo Wii console.

At around 9am that day, she had joined 18 other participants in a contest to see how much water they could consume without going to the lavatory in a competition being run by the radio station KDND 107.9.

The contest — during which participants were initially handed 237-millilitre bottles of water to drink every 15 minutes, and then given larger quantities if they lasted long enough — was around three hours long.

Ed Smith, the Sacramento County assistant coroner, said Ms Strange, a medical secretary, was likely to have died of the rare condition of water intoxication. He said that a preliminary autopsy could not determine exactly how much water Ms Strange had consumed, but it was "excessive". The woman had no life-threatening medical conditions and that her sudden death was "consistent with a water-intoxication death", Mr Smith added.

Water intoxication, or water poisoning, is a potentially fatal condition when a person consumes a large quantity of water and their bodily fluids become overly diluted, causing sodium levels to fall below normal. This can lead to brain swelling, seizures, coma and, in severe cases, death.

Even though the Sacramento sheriff's department has ruled out investigating the death as a criminal matter, John Geary, the vice-president of Entercom Sacramento, the radio station's owner, said staff were stunned by Ms Strange's death, and are "awaiting information that will help explain how this tragic event occurred".

According to Laura Rios, one of Ms Strange's co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento, she had called her supervisor on Friday shortly after she left the contest complaining of a headache, and said that she was going home for the day. "She was crying, and that was the last that anyone had heard from her," the colleague said.

Ms Strange's death is the latest accident to be associated with the Nintendo Wii, the new interactive console which has led to reports of injuries all over the world. Gamers pick up a controller and move their bodies in accordance with what's happening on the screen. In a tennis programme, for instance, players swing their arms to simulate groundstrokes.

So many injuries have occurred that a website, www.wiiinjury.com, has been set up by enthusiasts to share each others' injury experiences, and advise on how to play more safely.

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