While hospitalized with cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes, a 61-year-old American from Pittsburgh expected to be put on a list to receive a liver transplant. But as the urine tests were systematically positive, the doctors believed that she was hiding her dependence on alcohol, an eliminating condition for this kind of operation …
Yet this patient kept asserting that she did not drink a drop of alcohol. And by pushing the investigations further, the researchers did not indeed discover any trace of ethanol in his blood, they reveal in their study published in the Annals of internal medicine.
Ideal conditions for fermentation
In fact, it was the patient’s body that made the alcohol, a yeast (Candida glabrata ) colonizing the bladder fermented sugar to produce ethanol. With testing, doctors found that this yeast produced a remarkably high amount of alcohol, from 40 to 800 mg / dL in just a few hours! His diabetes produced a lot of sugar, the conditions were ideal for fermentation … In addition to the lack of oxygen and the presence of water, the bladder was the perfect place to brew!
What reminds the story of this American arrested at the wheel of his car and tested positive for the breathalyzer without having drunk anything. He had auto-brewing syndrome, also called intestinal fermentation syndrome. It is a rare and underdiagnosed disease caused by too much concentration in the body of the fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is found in pasta and rice.
They therefore proposed to call the disease of this first known patient suffering from this syndrome: “bladder fermentation syndrome” or “urinary self-brewing syndrome”.
Source:
- Urinary Auto-brewery Syndrome: A Case Report, Annals of internal medicine, May 2020
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