Page 16 - IAV Digital Magazine #493

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Doctors Report The First Known Case of A Person Who Urinates Alcohol
By: Peter Dockrill
A woman in Pittsburgh has become the first documented case in a living person of an unusual medical condition where alcohol naturally brews in the bladder from the fermentation of yeast.
The condition, which researchers pro- pose to call either
'bladder fermen- tation syndrome' or 'urinary auto- brewery syn- drome', is similar to another incred- ibly rare condi- tion, auto-brewery syndrome, where simply ingesting carbohydrates ca n be enough to make you inebri- ated, even with- out consuming any alcohol via regular means.
In the new case,
doctors became aware of what seems to be a related syndrome, after attending upon a 61-year- old patient who presented with liver damage and poorly con-
trolled diabetes.
The woman visit- ed University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre Presbyterian Hospital for placement on a
liver transplant waitlist, with doc- tors having previ- ously suspected her problems stemmed from alcohol addiction, due to repeated urine tests for alcohol showing consistently posi- tive.
"Initially, our encounters were similar, leading our clinicians to believe that she was hiding an alcohol use disor- der," her doctors explain in a new case report.
"However, we noted that plasma test results for ethanol and urine test results for ethyl glucuronide and ethyl sulfate, which are the metabolites of ethanol, were negative, where- as urine test results for ethanol were positive."
Furthermore, in addition to con- sistently denying having consumed alcohol, the patient did not appear to show
signs of intoxica- tion during visits to the clinic, even though her urine showed high lev- els of ethanol content.
Another mystery was the presence of large amounts of glucose in her urine – a condi- tion called hyper- glycosuria – with abundant levels of budding yeast seen in urine samples.
"These findings led us to test whether yeast colonising in the bladder could fer- ment sugar to produce
ethanol," the researchers write.
Running tests on her urine, the team confirmed remarkably high levels of ethanol production, sug- gesting her strange results were due to yeast fermenting sugar in the bladder.
The yeast in question was identified
as Candida
glabrata, a natu- ral yeast found in the body and related to brew- er's yeast, but not normally discov- ered in such abundance.
Unfortunately, efforts to elimi- nate the yeast with antifungal treatments failed, perhaps due to the patient's poor- ly controlled dia- betes. In light of the woman's seemingly unique predicament, the doctors note that she was recon- sidered for liver transplantation, although their report doesn't make clear what ultimately became of the patient.
While researching the woman's case, the doctors became aware of other reports involving similar production of ethanol in urine, but only in one postmortem case, and in experi- ments run in vitro.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine